EVERHART%ARISIA.decnet@crdgw1.ge.com (09/28/89)
Considering the possibility of several script languages, I've been fond of the way users did it on RSX11M. Where a command was not understood by a command processor, it would pass the whole thing unaltered to a successor processor and so on. Thus one had ...mcr, ...ca., ...ca2, ...ca3 and so on until the last one in the chain gave up and had to report "unrecognized command". (Actually our system had DAMMIT installed last, so the error report was one of a set of snappy remarks like "the way you type, we could be here forever", or again "I don't understand either; that command SHOULD have worked." If a standard were set such that a shell would invoke another shell upon failure to figure out a command, provided the "next" shell existed, and possibly were resident, Amiga users could do this same thing. No hassles with messing up EVERY command procedure with special comments...just an incredibly rich command language with precedence set by the user. (Under RSX one installed what one wanted as the processor for different parts of the chain. You could make the command language look like almost anything you wanted that way...) This is offered also partly as a counterpoint to those whose experience is limited to unix shells... Imagine having a slideshow of nudes entered as the catch-all command for typing errors... :-) Glenn Everhart Everhart%Arisia.decnet@crd.ge.com