creat 1214
No, not really.
I have been missing the COMND% interface style for years now; and I am contemplating building a shell for it; in the stunned realization that what the world really needs is another shell.
It is not that difficult to construct a simple grammar to describe what shell commands expect as input. Just do the commands-parse logic in a small language.
I agree which is why I'm so puzzled. But didn't anybody realize this before now? This was so obvious to me and that's why I started arguing with...
The beauty of the COMND% interface is that you have enough information to do a gui style presentation from the same data. It could even be the very same shell in two modes.
Some kind of pre-loaded shell scripts will handle most of this. The "small commands" are small enough that interpretation is not a huge disadvantage, and leave the full fork+exec for the real commands.
The problem is that such user interface code really does not belong in ring0. to use a multics term. Ref windows. Tops20 also did it wrong, but the consequences weren't as dire, because it is a clean interface that doesn't attract as much bload.
Now, it the command interface also had a graphical mode of operation, that would be another matter entirely.
-- mrr