From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2017 13:20:41 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Dash options In-Reply-To: <20171128131942.6705918C092@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20171128131942.6705918C092@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: 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 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 . separator, but I think Ken could have used it as easily at the time since the idea of and exposing semantics of what the file was in the name was foreign to UNIX (although was used in other systems as we know). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: