[COFF] Other OSes?

[Dan Cross]

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 7:28 PM Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:

> [...]
> I believe autocompletion has been available for 20+ years. IIRC, I
> switched to zsh in 1995 and it has had autocompletion then. But you
> do have to teach zsh/bash how to autocomplete for a given program.
>

csh has had filename auto-completion since the late 70s or early 80s,
though nowhere as rich or as full-featured as bash/zsh, let alone TOPS-20.

[...]
>
> This sort of magic incantation is needed because no one has bothered
> to create a simple library for autocompletion & no standard convention
> has sprung up that a program can use. It is not entirely trivial but
> not difficult either.


This. Much of the issue with Unix was convention, or rather, lack of a
consistent convention. Proponents of DEC operating systems that I've known
decry that Unix can't do stuff like, `RENAME *.FTN *.FOR`, because the
shell does wildcard expansion. Unix people I know will retort that that
behavior depends on programming against specific libraries. I think the big
difference is that the DEC systems really encouraged using those libraries
and made their use idiomatic and trivial; it was such a common convention
that NOT doing it that way was extraordinary. On the other hand, Unix never
mandated any specific way to do these things; as a result, everyone their
own thing. How many times have you looked at a Unix utility of, er, a
certain age, and seen `main()` start something like:

main(argc, argv)
        int argc;
        char *argv[];
{
        if (--argc > 0 && *argv[1] == '-') {
                argv++;
                while (*++*argv)
                switch (**argv) {
                case 'a':
                        /* etc.... */
                        continue;
                }
        }
        /* And so on.... */

I mean, goodness: we didn't even use getopt(3)! It was all hand-rolled! And
thus inconsistent.

Cisco's CLI is a great model for this. It would
> even prompt you with a help string for non-keyword args such as ip
> address or host! With Ciscso CLI ^D to list choices, ^I to try auto
> complete and ? to provide context sensitive help. It was even better
> in that you can get away with just typing a unique prefix. No need to
> hit <tab>. Very handy for interactive use.


This is unsurprising as the Cisco CLI is very clearly modeled after
TOPS-20/TENEX which did all of those things (much of which was in the CMND
JSYS after work transferred to DEC and TENEX became TOPS-20). It's
definitely one of the cooler features of twenex.

        - Dan C.
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