[TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces

[Chet Ramey]

On 7/31/21 12:19 PM, Dan Cross wrote:

> There was someone posting here on TUHS a while back about leveraging a 
> special context-sensitive `--shell-help` or similar command line program 
> and synthesizing a protocol between the shell and a program to provide 
> TOPS-20 like command completion. It was nowhere near what you get from the 
> COMND JSYS, but seemed like a reasonable approximation.

This is essentially how the existing shells do it (bash, zsh, tcsh, etc.),
but in an ad-hoc fashion. There is no standard way to obtain possible
completions or list possible arguments, so the shells push that to external
generators.

Since you have to perform the completion in the shell, there has to be some
way to tell the shell the possible completions for each command of
interest, whether that's options or arguments. The different shells have
solved that in essentially the same way, with a few syntactic variations.

Bash provides a framework (complete/compgen/compctl) and pushes a lot of
the command-specific work to external completers. It provides access to the
shell internals (lists of builtins, functions, aliases, variables, and so
on) and built-in ways to perform common completions (filenames, directory
names, command names, etc.), and leaves the rest to external commands or
shell functions.

The real power and flexibility comes from being able to invoke these
external commands or shell functions to generate lists of possible
completions, and defining an API between the shell and those generators to
specify enough of the command line to make it easy to find the word to be
completed, the command for which completion is being attempted, and
clarifying context around that word. In the same way, the shell provides an
API for those generators to return possible completions.

The knowledge about each command's options and arguments is embedded in
these generators.

A standard way to handle command line options and arguments would make
generators easier to write, but doesn't address the other issues of what,
exactly, the user wants to complete, so the existing mechanisms would
likely not change very much. Something like `--shell-help', as long as it
were context-sensitive, would help more.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/