From:	sam AT greenaumARSE!ARSE!ARSE!.demon.co.uk
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: Terminal Programming
Date:	Wed, 28 Jul 1999 00:10:10 GMT
Organization:	Rossum's Universal Robots
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You want ideas? Have an array of strings with your function names in
it, so you can compare them in turn, to give a number for the command.
Then you could possibly have a table of function pointers, if you
wanted.

Have a proper parser that splits your input into the first command,
and parameters (ie $0, $1, $2 etc). To avoid having to use a
variable-length array, or a list or something, only parse the first
ten words in an input, and keep the rest of the line up til <cr> as
just one string. Unix shell does it this way, $0 to $9 then $@ for the
rest. 

Make the parser flexible so you can use it in different routines.

Write some other general-purpose routines.

Give it a programming language so you can write batch files.

The for(;;) is obviously bad, invent some sort of nice clean exit
condition.

Some people have written things like this as replacement shells for
Unix, you could perhaps invent your own command-line alternative to
MS-DOS for file maintenance and things. One thing (just one) that DOS
sucks at, is wildcards and regular expressions, do something about
that. 

If you get a useful core up and running, you'll be adding things to it
and it'll grow up in no time. What do you mostly use DOS for?

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