Date:        Sun, 28 Jan 2001 02:02:53 -0500 (EST)
    From:        woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods)
    Message-ID:  <20010128070253.04DFA4@proven.weird.com>

  | I personally can't imagine why 'dig' was chosen

dig is far and away superior as a diagnostic tool than any of the
others.   My impression has always been that dig if for DNS people
who want to see the guts of what is happening, and host is for people
who just want to do a lookup, with little desire to know what is
really happening.  (And nslookup goes with the remnants of last night's
fish dinner...)

That might be one reason why people don't like the new version of host
(though I have never felt the need to fetch it) - if it has started
saying CNAME and A now instead of nickname and "has address" then it
is less suitable for what (used to be) its target audience.

  | I've never used it

No wonder you think that a better version of host is needed, if you're
attempting to use it as a DNS diagnostic tool, rather than as a simple
database query front end...   The rest of us all use dig for that.

kre