Re: denial of access

["R Tennenbaum"]

TBaehr@xxxxxxx wrote:

>> W95's
>> reluctance to spawn one DOS session from another.
>
>But you can spawn one DOS session from another. It's just that xpl can't
>follow you into and through the DOS prompt and never could

I'm close to getting in over my head, but in OS/2, thanks to IBM as
well as some ingenious third parties, xpl can be "retrofitted" to do
just that.  One thing which makes this possible is REXX, OS/2's superb
scripting language, which can be used in concert with the workplace
shell to set countless settings and variables at virtually every level
(version, device drivers, autoexec files, etc). (These are variables I
think it's possible to set under W9x, but I don't believe it's easy to
tailor things on the fly in this fashion.) So long as I can send a
coherent string to OS/2's (and REXX's) command processor, I'm able to
perform all sorts of "chaining" operations which are unheard of in
plain old DOS or Windows (personally I don't think there's any reason
one should not be, which isn't to say I'm not grateful for the ability
to do so). 

>You can also spawn a Windows program directly from the DOS command (and hence
>from the XY command line), including passed-thru variables. That's how I
>convert a file to RTF in XY4 and then start up WordPad or even Word, passing
>to it the name of the RTF file I just created.

I dn't want to get into a parsing contest here -- just to say that you
can do this in Xywrite under OS/2 as well, thanks to some enterprising
third parties -- Holmgren, Distefano, Juan Pujol. I can start or
switch to OS/2 programs directly from within Xywrite and therefore for
example, can hotkey out of full-screen Xywrite without a second
thought.

There isn't any need to restart the OS wars, each of us probably feel
as though we won inasmuch as we care at all. But with practically no
support from TTG, it just makes sense to be forward looking -- I'd love
to be proven wrong, but based on what we know now, DOS is endangered,
to put it kindly. I don't really know much about coding in assembler
language, but wouldn't it be great if it were possible to port Xy to
Java, or Linux -- just in case? That's something I might even help pay
for, in my pipe dreams anyway. Of course, if I were really smart, I'd
be running TTG or something.

--Rafe T.