pythonw.exe

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 3:14 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber
<wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>        Depends... "DOS", to me, is just short for "Disk Operating
> System"... I've source code (in a book) for K2FDOS, source code for
> LS-DOS 6, and have used the AmigaDOS component of AmigaOS (granted --
> AmigaDOS technically was the part of the OS that gave access to the I/O
> system, and included the command line interpreter...).
>
>        "DOS" does not automatically mean "MicroSoft DOS"...

I would say that DOS can, in a Windows context, mean either MS-DOS or
a generic Disk Operating System. The latter sense is no more
appropriate to the CLI than the former; in a modern OS, the part that
truly "operates the disk" would be either the kernel or the hard disk
driver, depending on your point of view, and neither of those has any
sort of UI.

>        What most call "DOS" is, to me, merely a "command line interpreter"
> (CLI).

And that's really what we have. A shell. A CLI. A textual command
parser (as opposed to a graphical action system which is what most
GUIs are). It's more similar to a MUD than to an operating system -
first space-separated word is a verb, everything else is modifiers.

ChrisA