[COFF] Other OSes?

[perry at piermont.com (Perry E. Metzger)]

On Thu, 5 Jul 2018 15:56:50 +1000 Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> OK, I guess I'll be the one to start things going on the COFF list.
> 
> What other features, ideas etc. were available in other operating
> systems which Unix should have picked up but didn't?
> 
> [ Yes, I know, it's on-topic for TUHS but I doubt it will be for
> long! ]

A minor feature that I might mention: TOPS-20 CMND JSYS style command
completion. TL;DR, this feature could now be implemented, as after
decades of wanting it I finally know how to do it in a unixy way.

In TOPS-20, any time you were at the EXEC (the equivalent of the
shell), you could hit "?" and the thing would tell you what options
there were for the next thing you could type, and you could hit ESC to
complete the current thing. This was Very Very Nice, as flags and
options to programs were all easily discoverable and you had a handy
reminder mechanism when you forgot what you wanted.

bash has some vague lame equivalents of this (it will complete
filenames if you hit tab etc.), and if you write special scripts you
can add domain knowledge into bash of particular programs to allow for
special application-specific completion, but overall it's kind of lame.

Here's the Correct Way to implement this: have programs implement a
special flag that allows them to tell the shell how to do completion
for them! I got this idea from this feature being hacked in, in an ad
hoc way, into clang:

http://blog.llvm.org/2017/09/clang-bash-better-auto-completion-is.html

but it is apparent that with a bit of work, one could standardize such
a feature and allow nearly any program to provide the shell with such
information, which would be very cool. Best of all, it's still unixy
in spirit (IMHO).

Kudos to the LLVM people for figuring out the right way to do
this. I'd been noodling on it since maybe 1984 without any real
success.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com