On 23 May 2004 at 16:33, Philip Aker wrote:

> On Sunday, May 23, 2004, at 11:44 America/Vancouver, Dennis 
> Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
> 
> > At 09:49 AM 5/23/04 -0700, Philip Aker wrote:
> >> Other concepts stemming from MacOS X having BSD underpinnings have
> >> been ripped off too. Like standard unix shell commands and
> >> scripting language implementations.
> 
> > You mean like DOS?
> 
> I always thought DOS was ripped from unix but someone on the 
> AppleScript list told me it was mostly ripped off from another 
> operating system of the era (CP/M ??).

MS-DOS was created out of a DOS (Q-DOS?) that was purchased by MS. 
That original was copied from CP/M.

But command lines don't demonstrate lineage, any more than saying 
"well, that child has two legs and two arms, so she must be the 
offspring of that man over there, who also has two legs and two 
arms."

And to use command line functionality as evidence of something that 
was copied from the very last major OS platform in the world to offer 
a command line is the most delicious irony of all.

It demonstrates a breathtaking insularity that's almost charmingly 
quaint.

> But no, I meant something with a development name of something like
> XAML, MONAD, or MSH which I understand to be similar to what one can
> do with AppleScript and shell commands (what I was referring to
> above). One can implement a full featured GUI application with
> AppleScript that is indistinguishable to the user from other OS X
> applications done in Cocoa or Carbon. One can call BSD shell commands
> from AppleScript if any of those facilities are needed. That is to say
> a shell (like Terminal.app) is not needed. In it's usage for
> applications, AppleScript maps roughly 85% of Cocoa directly and can
> do SOAP/RPC. It's honking powerful. And before D.W. Fenton replies
> with scads of useless MS history, this implementation is evolving from
> HyperCard (1987).

You're mixing up so many different distinct categories that it's not 
worth trying to untangle them.

For what it's worth, Microsoft has *not* copied the kind of 
functionality AppleScript gives to end users.

The Windows Scripting Host may *look* like it's designed for that 
purpose, but it obviously is not, once you look at how it works and 
what it does.

And it's worthless, to boot (let alone being a huge security risk).

[]

> > But you have to admit shell commands and scripting *were* an
> > essential part of DOS well into the Windows years. I still use them
> > for things such as mass-renaming of files. And lots of those
> > commands are pretty close to Unix ones ... so much so that FreeBSD
> > has added a number of useful commands (such as DIR) that emulate DOS
> > behavior.
> 
> I wasn't talking about your beloved DOS batch commands. I used similar
> facilities myself on old MacOS with Tcl/Tk. Right tool for the job.
> But not the same thing.

Then maybe you need to improve the precision of the language in which 
you express your assertions.

-- 
David W. Fenton                        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc

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