On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 3:14 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > Depends... "DOS", to me, is just short for "Disk Operating > System"... I've source code (in a book) for K2FDOS, source code for > LS-DOS 6, and have used the AmigaDOS component of AmigaOS (granted -- > AmigaDOS technically was the part of the OS that gave access to the I/O > system, and included the command line interpreter...). > > "DOS" does not automatically mean "MicroSoft DOS"...
I would say that DOS can, in a Windows context, mean either MS-DOS or a generic Disk Operating System. The latter sense is no more appropriate to the CLI than the former; in a modern OS, the part that truly "operates the disk" would be either the kernel or the hard disk driver, depending on your point of view, and neither of those has any sort of UI. > What most call "DOS" is, to me, merely a "command line interpreter" > (CLI). And that's really what we have. A shell. A CLI. A textual command parser (as opposed to a graphical action system which is what most GUIs are). It's more similar to a MUD than to an operating system - first space-separated word is a verb, everything else is modifiers. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
