15 Dec
2011
15 Dec
'11
11:26 a.m.
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011, Toby Thain wrote:
But that's a nonsensical conclusion, by the
reasoning I gave above. You
don't have to change the operating system to fix whatever defective
behaviour you've found in shells (still unclear what that is, unless we
are still talking about the faux-DOS command that failed to DWIM).
In MS-DOS, . . .
PC-DOS 1.xx, as one of the appendices in the manual included a [somewhat
oversimplified] description of the requirements for a replacement CLI to
use in place of COMMAND.COM 30 years ago, they explicitly made provision
for replacing COMMAND.COM with alternative CLIs or even GUIs!
Instead of doing exactly that, the replacements, even those from MICROS~1,
were all just layered on top of COMMAND.COM
It becomes necessary to differentiate which intolerable issues (such as
those involving filenames) are part of the CLI, and which are built into
the "File Manager" (IBMDOS.COM/MSDOS.SYS), such as the FCB structure, and
which are in the "hardware interface" (IBMBIO.COM/IO.SYS, ROM BIOS)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com