Hmmmm, let me remember old things....
The goal of the Amiga system, with Arexx and GUI, was to make all programs
compatible with some kind of extended (and powerfull) pipes, that can
controls all public functions of the programs. UIK (from JM Forgeas) and
AppShell (dropped project from Commodore) were designed with this goal : the
target program declare some 'public' functions, the GUI and OS already have
some, and the user or a 3rd party could write a 'script' that call theses
functions (to emulate inputs from GUI, chain 2 or more programs, create new
functions (by adding new menus entries), etc...).
It's one step after Arexx, and maybe 2 steps after pipes.

PS: I was really disappointed when CBM dropped AppShell project. I have
worked 1 year on this ;-)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Iggy Drougge" <iggy@kristallpojken.org>
To: "NetBSD/advocacy" <netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 2:41 AM
Subject: Re: [open-source] Sun to start charging for Star Office


> Wojciech Puchar skrev:
>
> >do you know any desktop environment allowing to use basic unix mechanism
> >easily?
>
> >like pipes at least?!
>
> The closest thing to pipes in a GUI environment which I've found is ARexx
on
> the Amiga. The very nature of most GUI programs makes pipes unworkable,
but
> ARexx allows inter-procedure scripting, so that results may be forwarded
> between programs. OLE and similar embedding techniques in MacOS and
Windows,
> if they'd have caught on, might provide something similar.
>
> --
> En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
>
> Iggy tipsar: Vill du läsa en PDF-fil, men saknar läsare, skicka den till
> pdf2txt@adobe.com, du får den tillbaka som ren ASCII till din epostadress.
>