[COFF] Other OSes?

[Steve Johnson]

That's an interesting topic, but it also gets my mind thinking about
UNIX features that were wonderful but didn't evolve as computers did.

My two examples of this are editor scripts and shell scripts.   In
the day, I would write at least one shell script and several editor
scripts a day.  Most of them were 2-4 lines long and used once.  But
they allowed operations to be done on multiple files quite quickly and
safely.

With the advent of glass teletypes, shell scripts simply evaporated --
there was no equivalent.  (yes, there were programs like sed, but it
wasn't the same...).  Changing, e.g., a function name oin 10 files
got a lot more tedious.

With the advent of drag and drop and visual interfaces, shell scripts
evaporated as well.   Once again, doing something on 10 files got
harder than before.   I still use a lot of shell scripts, but mostly
don't write them from scratch any more.

What abstraction mechanisms might we add back to Unix to fill these
gaps?

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From:
 "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com>

To:
"Bakul Shah" <bakul at bitblocks.com>
Cc:
<coff at tuhs.org>
Sent:
Thu, 5 Jul 2018 11:23:04 -0400
Subject:
Re: [COFF] Other OSes?

On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 2:40 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com [1]>
 wrote:
On Jul 4, 2018, at 10:56 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org [2]> wrote:
 > 
 > OK, I guess I'll be the one to start things going on the COFF list.
 > 
 > What other features, ideas etc. were available in other operating
 > systems which Unix should have picked up but didn't?
 > 
 > [ Yes, I know, it's on-topic for TUHS but I doubt it will be for
long! ]

- Capabilities (a number of OSes implemented them -- See Hank Levy's
book:
   https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/ [3]
 - Namespaces (plan9)

​+1 for both​

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ᐧ

 

Links:
------
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[2] mailto:wkt at tuhs.org
[3] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/
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