[COFF] Other OSes?

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Sun, 8 Jul 2018 20:19:18 -0400 Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 8:12 PM Perry E. Metzger
> <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 8 Jul 2018 16:27:54 -0700 Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com>
> > wrote:
> > [snip]  
> > > 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.  
> >
> > Yes, I know. That's exactly what I'm explaining. Read the URL
> > above. It describes a quite general mechanism for a program to
> > convey to the shell, without needing any special binary support,
> > how autocompletion should work.  
> 
> 
> I read that article and it wasn't clear to me that the
> `--autocomplete` argument sent anything back to the shell.

The shell autocompletion script parses the output. That's the
point of the facility. It lets you get a TOPS-20 style completion
model where you get completion and help on all options, but the shell
doesn't need to be given that information ad hoc, it gets it from the
program through the use of the --autocomplete flag.

> I
> suppose you could use it with bash/zsh style completion script to
> get something analogous to context-sensitive help,

That's the sole purpose of it.

> but it relies on
> exec'ing the command (clang or whatever) and getting output from it
> that someone or something can parse and present back to the user in
> the form of a partial command line;

That's what it does, yes.

> This is rather unlike how TOPS-20 did it, wherein an image was
> run-up in the user's process (effectively, the program was exec'ed,
> though under TOPS-20 exec didn't overwrite the image of the
> currently running program like the shell) and asked about
> completions.

In this case, the program is run and asked about completions. It's a
somewhat different mechanism, but Unix is a different operating
system, and in the modern world, the time involved is ignorable.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com