> On May 16, 2024, at 1:50 PM, Kevin Jordan <k...@kyrafre.com> wrote:
>
> Regarding NOS/VE and the notion that its command language was horribly
> awkward ... the command language was strongly influenced by Multics and some
> thinking in the Computer Science world about user-friendliness in command
> languages being linked to predictability. ...
It's taken a while for people to learn that languages need to be designed to
match the environment where they are used. Language needed for rapid
interaction can't be as verbose as regular programming languages. The Unix
shell takes that notion to extremes (as does the ITS command handler, from what
little I know of it -- and its ancestor the PDP-10 interactive debugger).
One of my favorite examples of an interesting command language is the one on
Burroughs mainframes, called WFL (work flow language). It looks vaguely like
ALGOL, for the very good reason that is is compiled into executable code that
is run to perform the various operations you ask for, by invoking the various
applications as "forks" and executing flow control like "if" and looping
statements. For ALGOL programmers, which was most of us on that system, it was
a very comfortable setup. Oh yes, that was a batch system, so WFL would be on
card decks, not banged into a terminal interactively.
paul
