On Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:40:30 -0500, zMan wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 12:35 PM, McKown, John wrote:
>> I think IBM would do well to adopt yet another UNIX concept: The "escape".
>> The ; would be a logical line end. Like NL in UNIX. But you can put a
>> reverse solidus (backslash \) in front of it to escape it.
>
>> ex '\;' would make ; a literal. That does require ex '\\' to exclude the \
>> itself. But you could then ex '\'' to exclude a ' as well.
>
I'm pretty unhappy with the multiple meanings of backslash
in UNIX. Sometimes it means take the following character
as a literal, as in \" or \\. Sometimes it gives a special
meaning to the following character[s] as in \n, \t, \a,
or \000. Sometimes it deletes the following character, as
in \<LF>. Sometimes the \ itself is merely a literal,
as in '\'.
>Ahem, that was a VM concept long before UNIX even existed. Double
>quote is the default escape character in VM, has been since 1967.
>
VM is laudably more consistent. " is always the escape character
in linemode input. That said, I don't need it. It's residue
from the 3215 printer-keyboard. I CP SET LINEDIT OFF immediately
in my PROFILE EXEC. I wish LINEDIT OFF could be the default
_before_ LOGON for 3270 terminals. (It can, but our systems
programmer won't enable that option.) Too many times I've
been a party in:
"VM won't accept my password."
"Does it contain an '@'?"
"I'm not disclosing anything about my password!"
"Go to Hell; you obviously don't want to be helped."
Of course, the user can quote special characters in the
password with ". But that's apt to overflow the password
field on the login screen.
And, long ago, in my PROFILE XEDIT I tried to do
LOAD FOO#BAR ASSEMBLE A
Well, # is XEDIT's default command separator. I can turn
that off in my PROFILE XEDIT, but that only works _after_
the LOAD. IBM fixed it by APAR.
-- gil
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