Command line arguments??

[greg]

Rhodri James wrote:
> We've been living with this pain ever since windowed GUIs encouraged 
> users  to put spaces in their file names (Apple, I'm looking at you!).

It's not really Apple's fault. There was no problem with
spaces in filenames in the classic MacOS environment,
because there was no textual command language (at least
not one that people used in day-to-day work).

There's a slight problem sometimes in MacOSX when you
use the shell, but at least unix passes args to a program
as separate strings, so as long as you exec() something
directly and avoid the shell, you're safe.

Windows, on the other hand, passes all the args as a
single string, whether a shell is involved or not
(due to blindly adopting CP/M's argument passing
mechanism into MSDOS).

Microsoft screwed up by trying to partially implement
Apple's ideas on top of a system that wasn't engineered to
cope with them.

-- 
Greg