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Coolest thing of SINTRAN (ND's O/S) was the command shell which was designed such that you could have expressive long names for commands and other files, yet co
by tannhaeuser 7y ago
Coolest thing of SINTRAN (ND's O/S) was the command shell which was designed such that you could have expressive long names for commands and other files, yet could also use short forms for easy typing in a word-lattice kind of way (and more stylish than on Unix). For example, the "ls" command was "list-files" and you could write "li-fi" or "l-f" as long as there was no other command/executable in scope that would be ambiguous. Worked with more than a single hyphen as well (eg. set-file-permission etc.)
Actually I implemented a Unix glob filter that did exactly that out of boredom on a project 20 years ago :)
I guess emacs users and LISPers in general would be loving it (the concept not my C implementation that is).
- thatfunkymunki 7y agoCisco shell is like this, 'show running-config' becomes 'sh ru'
- pinewurst 7y agoThe Cisco shell is a direct descendent of the DEC TOPS-20 one BTW.
- cat199 7y ago> direct descendent never heard anything like this - care to elaborate / point?
- pinewurst 7y agoThe Cisco founders were DEC20/TOPS20 fanatics from Stanford. It’s perfectly sensible that their chosen CLI would reflect their favorite example - and it really is an excellent CLI. Post Cisco, Len Bosack actually started a company, XKL, intending to build the next-gen DEC20. By the time this actually happened, the world had long moved on and XKL redirected to optical networks stuff.