[Catalyst] (OT) It’s not CMD.EXE’s fault (was: Easier catalyst installation)

[A. Pagaltzis]

Hi Nilson,

* Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior <acid06 at gmail.com> [2006-04-04 22:00]:
> On 4/4/06, Scott Karns <scott at karnstech.com> wrote:
> > <levity>
> > At times like this, don't you just love windows?
> > </levity>
> 
> Actually I hate when I'm on Linux and can't use double quotes
> since that means shell variables interpolation. This is merely
> a matter of being used to doing it one way or another.

The matter is more insidious than that. DOS and Win32 don’t have
a notion of argv; the command line is just a string, as opposed
to a list of strings like it is on *nix. So on Win32, every
program has to implement its own command line quoting parser to
cope with spaces in parameters and even though there is a
de-facto standard syntax, of course everyone has different bugs.
This design decision also means that there is no reliable way to
pass a list of arguments to a program you’re launching. You
always have to mash everything into a single string while futzing
around wth quoting/escaping.

So it’s not just a matter of “used to one way or another”; it’s a
matter of “the shell can’t wrap useful syntax around braindead
system semantics.”

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>