Unix shell design [was Re: Yes, Unix can do batch renames - Re: Unix handles file extensions "very poorly"?]

I think it's no coincidence that most Lisp systems provide a way to write not only functions that eval their arguments, but `functions' that get passed their arguments unevaled. Some of the reasons for this have no analog here. But some are fairly closely analogous. If we could invent some way for a program to indicate, pre-exec, that it wants unglobbed (`unevaled') arguments, this might be doable. Or, perhaps, programs always get globbed arguments, but there's some way for them to obtain the arglist in its pre-globbing form. main(argc,argv,envp,preglobargv)? I know, I know...but there's some truth here. Two different truths, in fact. One truth is that there is strong pressure against "friendly" in Unix. The other is that, as consistent and predictable as the Unix mechanisms are, and as valuable as that consistency is, they do have downsides. I think there are major parts of the pressure against "friendly" - which, as it is usually used, really means "novice-friendly". One is that novice-friendly correlates remarkably well with expert-hostile. This is somewhat inevitable, since part of being novice-friendly is preventing self-foot-shooting - but expert-friendly means not preventing stupid things because that also prevents clever things. Not surprisingly, the experts who would have to implement novice-friendliness are rather, um, hostile, to expert-hostile things. The other is that novice-friendly also means logically inconsistent special cases. I'm not sure why this is; I speculate that it's because humans are not logical creatures, so working the way a human, at least a na?ve human, expects involves accurately matching a bunch of messy heuristics. This means that it's difficult to do at all, _extremely_ difficult to get right, and possibly even completely impossible to get right for more than one person at a time. This is why I'm not looking for a way to "fix" rm. I'm looking for a generalized facility that can be used to "fix" rm as a special case. It is much more in keeping with the Unix philosophy to introduce a new pattern than to introduce a special case. That's not the Unix philosophy. That's a the philosophy of a wannabe who doesn't yet understand. The Unix philsophy leading to many of the same observed effects as that one is actually "don't prevent stupid things because doing so also prevents clever things". To the extent that stupid things can be prevented without also preventing clever things, it's often done, and rarely objected to. I don't think I've ever done that. I _have_ done "rm *>o" (actually, I'm not sure I've done it with rm; I've certainly done the same thing, mutatis mutandis of course, with other commands). Har. Anyone who thinks Unix gurus never make typos is clearly not a Unix guru. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B