lazarus@igloo.UUCP (David Sugar) (06/22/88)
As some of you may already know, I am one of the authors of COMMAND.COM, a ProDOS 8 command shell available through Pinpoint and Hyperdyne Software. I am also planning a 16 bit version of this product (CMD/16). At present, many of the new command shells already available or soon to be available for ProDOS 16 each use their own private set of system extensions, the most 'famous' of which is, of course the APW/ORCA shell. I undsertand that the P16 version of Davex will also have a brand new family of system extensions, and I would venture to guess that of HAL labs ANIX is upgraded to P16, they will probably port their ANIX system calls as well. The net effect of this is that when you create a program for a specific shell that takes advantage of some of these nifty extensions, you end up with a program that will only run with that shell. In the case of CMD/16, I will also be adding some extensions to P16 to support a global symbol/alias table, I/O redirection/piping calls, access to system batch variables, etc. However, I believe I have come up with a workable solution that will allow CMD/16 specific programs to run under other shells - the P16 extensions for CMD/16 (including the APW 'compatibility' extensions) will ALL be supplied in a stand alone and public domain STR package that can be placed in the SYSTEM.SETUP directory. At present there has been close to 200 different command programs (not counting enhanced versions of older utilities) written for COMMAND.COM written by me and others, including of course XTERM, and a soon to be released structured Basic. Many of these will be ported to CMD/16. Although I naturally feel that CMD/16 will be the 'only' shell people will want to use, there will naturally be others with a different opinion, but who may like some/most/all the utilities. I believe this solution will make sure they are not left out and will allow people to develop applications for CMD/16 that will still be usable by the Apple community at large. I am interested in obtaining feedback/opinions on the viability of this kind of solution. Dave Source: SIG054 ..ihnp4!ddsw1!igloo!lazarus GEnie: D.SUGAR1 ..gryphon!igloo!lazarus