16 May
2024
16 May
'24
6:09 p.m.
On May 16, 2024, at 1:50 PM, Kevin Jordan
<kej(a)kyrafre.com> wrote:
Regarding NOS/VE and the notion that its command language was horribly awkward ... the
command language was strongly influenced by Multics and some thinking in the Computer
Science world about user-friendliness in command languages being linked to predictability.
...
It's taken a while for people to learn that languages need to be designed to match the
environment where they are used. Language needed for rapid interaction can't be as
verbose as regular programming languages. The Unix shell takes that notion to extremes
(as does the ITS command handler, from what little I know of it -- and its ancestor the
PDP-10 interactive debugger).
One of my favorite examples of an interesting command language is the one on Burroughs
mainframes, called WFL (work flow language). It looks vaguely like ALGOL, for the very
good reason that is is compiled into executable code that is run to perform the various
operations you ask for, by invoking the various applications as "forks" and
executing flow control like "if" and looping statements. For ALGOL programmers,
which was most of us on that system, it was a very comfortable setup. Oh yes, that was a
batch system, so WFL would be on card decks, not banged into a terminal interactively.
paul