User interface philosophy and history

[Pat Morrow]

In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.960320100122.25417e-100000 at cast>, 
malcolm at cast.uark.edu says...
>
>On 20 Mar 1996, Pat Morrow wrote:  [actually Gordon Haverland wrote]
>
>> Is there some archive of information about how
>> the user interface for the GRASS suite, and
>> garden were developed?  Why GRASS routines
>> are supposed to be C language only (K&R? ANSI?)?
>
>Most of these issues are already addressed in the GRASS4.1 Programmer's 
>Manual (340 pp.). Ftp yourself a copy if you don't already have it; it's 
>a valuable resource.
>
>Regards,
>        -Malcolm Williamson
>
I think I have a GRASS 4.0 Programmers manual around here somewhere,
and it mentioned things like GRASS not using C++, but I don't seem
to remember seeing discussions as to WHY things were decided.
Most C and C++ programs under UNIX use getopts to parse the command
line for flags and options.  GRASS uses its own type of command line,
which seems to be more remeniscent (sp?) of some of the X-Windows
command lines, with a zillion options  (although X-Windows gives
one the option of putting most of these options into *rc scripts).
  
 Gordon Haverland, P.Eng.
 Alberta Agriculture
 Precision Farming Project
 ghaverla at freenet.edmonton.ab.ca
 goddard at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (or whatever this account is called)