Charles Shannon Hendrix skrev:

>On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 02:41:20AM +0100, Iggy Drougge wrote:
>> 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.

>I don't think pipes are orthagonal to a GUI at all.

Beyond the very simplest file-selector GUI programs, I can't envision an
implementation of UNIX-style pipes. As Wojciech wrote, UNIX uses small,
carefully defined programs which are linked through pipes. This is basically
non-interactive, very orthagonal to VMS (or DEC inspired UNIX programs like
FTP). The general GUI program will conduct a task in several steps or through
a prolonged procedure, very unlike the in-out behaviour of UNIX CLI programs.

>For example, what is wrong with connecting files with pipes graphically,

Graphically represented pipes? Interesting idea. Mind you, I suppose one could
save to /dev/pipe with any GUI program. The clipboard could also be thought of
as a manually operated pipe.

>and selecting programs and connecting them with data, etc?

How would this look to the user?

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