File specification regularity

[Eric S. Raymond]

In article <3981 at enea.se>, sommar at enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
> On the other hand, on VMS you can do the following:
> DEFINE/TRANSLATION=CONCEALED NEWS_ROOT SYS$SYSROOT:<UTILS.ANUNEWS> 
> (This may be the wrong syntax. My apoligies if so.)

<chortle> Does anyone else see the funny here? The VMS syntax is so flinkin'
obscure that you can't be sure you've got it right. Compare the alphabet-soup
VMS command above with the more-or-less equivalent UNIX link invocation:

ln /usr/bin/utils/anunews /newsroot

Now: which would *you* rather wake up next to? :-)

In a less facetious vein: which of the above requires less mental parsing,
fewer interpretation rules with fewer exception cases? *This* is what Dave
Arnold was getting at. Arguing that VMS's baroque syntax supports a feature
UNIX doesn't isn't an appropriate counter, especially when you're wrong ;-).

> Thus, you can't be sure that every utility you use will understand
> $NEWS_ROOT, in which case you have to remember the entire path.
> (I may be totally wrong about Unix here. If so, please correct me.)

This is exactly what UNIX links are for, especially BSD-style symbolic
links (which AT&T is supposedly including in 4.0).
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
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