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Honestly one could argue that DOS has some merit beyond Unix. It’s simple command line interface expects users will program in other languages like C or assembl
by bjornjajayaja 5y ago
Honestly one could argue that DOS has some merit beyond Unix. It’s simple command line interface expects users will program in other languages like C or assembly. It’s more directly interaction with the machine. Sure it had limitations like file name lengths etc back in the day, but I think many Unix shells are overly complex and ought to yield to more suitable languages like Perl.
- hashkb 5y agoMany of the standard unix tools are not written in sh. They're written in C. Am I missing something in your comment?
- ticviking 5y ago> It’s simple command line interface expects users will program in other languages like C or assembly. I think the point here is that DOS explicitly rejects the composition that pipes enable, in exchange for the ability to just hand "the whole system" over to a programmer.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoDOS had pipes since version 2.0 I believe. But the main point, that DOS was basically a thin program loader that "got out of the way" is sound. Think of it like a UEFI shell environment, with 640k+ limits.
- unilynx 5y agoDos pipes were just writes and reads to temporary files. No parallel processes
- mixmastamyk 5y agoOk, but didn't concern the end user, as far as I can remember.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoAgreed in general, however shell languages (should) have a different focus, such as running processes. There's been a few attempts at this, but I settled on the fish shell as it has a good balance and syntax highlighting for interactivity. I still write simple scripts in sh and complex ones in Python however.