[TUHS] Dash options

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

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dash as switches were always explained to me as from Multics.   Having used
DEC systems, Univax and IBM systems originally with cards and ASR33s, I was
not yet stubborn enough to see value one way or the other (the links in
ROMs in my fingers were not yet programmed).  By the time I left CMU and
the glass tty was all I was willing to use.  I had become a UNIX/C person
more than anything else, so slashes as switches (and upper case and case
folding) had become annoying and just seemed wrong.

On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 8:19 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

> According to "The Evolution of the Unix Timesharing System", full path
> names
> arrived later than I/O redirection, so by they time they needed a
> separator,
> '>' and '<' were gone.

​That was the impression I had had and I admit I think I must have either
assumed it, heard it in conversation, or maybe read it at some point in
this paper.   Cann't say when I started to think same, but I came to UNIX
in Fifth and Sixth so, they were already there.  I was just learning the
'UNIX way' at the time.​   I guess because I was using so many
different systems at the time, I was more willing to accept every dialect
had its way of doing things.   As Greg points out EXEC-8 was hardly
anything like TSS/360 and learned them together.   Same as TOPS/TWINEX and
eventually VMS.

Funny, things is I left those other systems and then was forced to come
back to them, first RT11 and then NOS/KRONOS and then VMS and I remember
grumbling.  By then the ROMs had been forced in my muscle memory.

'/' also has the advantage of being a non-shift
> ​ ​
> character!
>
​Hmm, so was dot, which is what TSS and MTS used.​  DEC was using it as the
<base>.<ext> separator, but I think Ken could have used it as easily at the
time since the idea of <ext> and exposing semantics of what the file was in
the name was foreign to UNIX (although was used in other systems as we
know).
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