[P1] OT: User Interface (was Fix_prebinding is crashing on start)

[Mike Beede]

On Sunday, Jan 26, 2003, at 14:40 US/Central, Richard McKay wrote:

> why in this day and age can a computer only have two states 1 or 0?
> why are we still basing most of our energy programming with 
> hexadecimal 8
> bit concepts that were hardware induced in the beginning?
> why can we not make another few levels of translators for the human
> interface to machine code, I mean really! there are 7 layers to tcp/ip 
> and
> with a program?

Since everyone else feels free to make off-topic posts at will, I'll
do so too.  A Long Time Ago, some folks made an interface called
DWIM, which stands for "Do What I Mean."  The general idea was that
if you typed something that didn't really make sense to the
shell, it would start messing around with various typing corrections
until it came up with a command that *did* make sense (for a limited
definition of "make sense," of course).  (Actually "shell" is an
incorrect but benign simplification in this case).

The problem is that frequently the action chosen wasn't really the
one the user meant to execute, especially as the number of possible
errors grew.  Also, it could be pretty slow.

For those interested, a couple URLs:

http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/DWIM.html
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/7.13.html#subj3

Regards,

	Mike Beede