>> I'm not sure I agree. The VMS command line I used sucked, but so >> did Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways. > What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line?
I'm sure there were many, mostly small ones. Here are the ones big enough for me to remember after this many years (this was in the early-to-mid '80s): - No command-line editing. (Well, minimal: editing at end-of-line, but only there.) - Verbosity. - Some degree of syntax straitjacket. Of these, verbosity is the only one not shared with - or, rather, significantly less present in - Unix shells of the time. Of course, it also had plenty of up sides too. The principal one I remember was the uniformity of syntax across disparate commands - this is the flip side of what I called a "syntax straitjacket" above. For the most part, like Unix shells, DCL was fine: it worked well enough for us to get useful stuff done. (The above discussion applies to DCL. I never used MCR enough to have anything useful to say, positive or negative, about it.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
