RE: How did AIX beat out i5/OS was: IBM tech support for BCS

AIX != i5/OS. AIX is akin to UNIX but you know that. I'm not familiar
with any *NIX that has the interactive command prompting, named
parameter style, and context-sensitive help that i5/OS offers. I would
go so far to posit that because the underlying *NIX does not offer a
command prompting framework, no one has written one. How would you write
promptable command interfaces for awk, sed, grep, ps, wget, etc. and
have them consistent? Who would maintain them when those commands
change? How would you translate command switches versus pseudo-named
parameters? How would you handle positional parameters? What happens
when you're not on a system with the prompting framework in place?

Remember in the beginning *NIX was written by programmers, primarily for
programmers.

BTW, "consistent name[d]" commands are anathema to your hardcore *NIX
admins. <tic>

Loyd Goodbar
Business Systems
BorgWarner Shared Services
662-473-5713
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2008 6:25 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: How did AIX beat out i5/OS was: IBM tech support for BCS

I want the AIX command line to function the same as command entry.
Commands have a consistent name, are promptable, help is available on
each parameter, commands can be logged to the joblog, scripts can be
compiled as native programs on the platform.