"Steve Holden" <sholden@[...].com>  wrote in message 
>  
>  Was this the one that allowed to you define command lines like
>  
>      COPY FROM <file> TO <file>
>  
>  and variations could be deduced from the noise words? I seem to remember a
>  college chum of mine working in BCPL with a scheme like this, circa 1978,
>  but have only this fading memory.

Yes. I had several Amigas for several years and I always loved those
command lines. The nice thing about it was that you could give
arguments by name and/or position:

   COPY <file>  <file>
   COPY TO <file>  FROM <file>

Sometimes this was rather convenient, e.g. if you had to repeat a
command a few times and change an argument (not often enough for a
loop or script, though).
You'd just hit Cursor-Up, Ctrl-W and type in the new argument.

And it looked nice, at least nicer than '-', '--' or '/'. The letters
are also easier to reach on the keyboard.

I would have written a parser for this under Unix, but I prefer to
have a consistent interface, which means basically getopt() (though I
did write my own C getopt()).

Hans-J.
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