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[Industrial Poet]

In <93...@gollum.twg.com> da...@twg.com (David S. Herron) writes:
>To run a system (this seems to be true of any system) one needs to
>toss in scripts which do the administrative chores for you.
[...]
>Now.. suppose the MacIntosh approach were taken & *everything* had
>a GUI attached to it? What do the shell scripts look like?

They look like little icons of a document with a picture on. When you drop
them on the shell/agent icon, they are run. When you drop them on the editor
icon, you can edit them.

> The GUI paradigm is useful for doing things which
>a human being must be minutely involved with performing. However
>a person minutely involved in processing & sumarizing the log
>files at 3AM would quickly go homocidal, no?

Depends whether the GUI is any good.

>You mentioned somewhere "macro maker". My impression (never used one)
>is that these collect a bunch of `events' for later replaying. This
>is then used as the "shell script" paradigm I talk about above. But
>aren't there dreadfully serious problems with this? (I see two)
>
>-- Conciseness. That is, the traditional shell-script displays
> a lot of information in a small area (except for DCL scripts).
> This can make it easier to understand a script & get a global
> overview of its functioning.
>
> The sort of "macro maker" envisioning itself in my brain would
> be showing the normal screen(s) for one application at a time
> and recording events.

NewWave's Agent system has a complete programming language for expressing
what you want to do. So does Direct Technology's new Automator for Windows.

>-- Susceptibility to changes of detail in presentation. What happens
> when a later version of an application changes things around?
> Do you have to rerecord the event sequence?

Depends. NewWave uses window names to tell windows apart, so if the
application name changes you might have problems. Mind you, if the
application name changes your CLI batch files would break as well.

>-- Decision making. Traditional shell scripts are like programming
> languages in that they can inspect their input and branch to
> different sections of the program depending on what is there.

So are good agent programming languages for GUIs.

mathew

[Michael S. Pereckas]

In <4uLk71...@mantis.co.uk> mat...@mantis.co.uk (Industrial Poet) writes:

>NewWave's Agent system has a complete programming language for expressing
>what you want to do. So does Direct Technology's new Automator for Windows.

Of course, all unix systems have sh, and all messy-dos systems support
batch files. This can be useful. (Granted, DOS needs special help in
the form of a dozen extra utilities....)

--

< Michael Pereckas <> m-per...@uiuc.edu <> Just another student... >
The answer is probably clear to former astronaut Kerwin, since he's
been out there. He knows the thrill of experiencing weightlessness
while sober. ---Mike Royko