I like this: it looks at details, and specifically at details of the software, and I like that because it’s the way I viewed the Amiga and the reason I chose it. It looked like a sophisticated offering!
Little Things That Made Amiga Great
Here’s an example:
ReadArgs
While AmigaOS doesn’t have online documentation like UNIX man pages, it does have a standardized way for CLI programs to read arguments. This is facilitated by the ReadArgs function, designed to help programmers implement this way of reading arguments.
The
?(question mark) argument always produces a list of a command’s arguments and their kind, and then awaits user input of said arguments
We meet Arexx. and AmigaGuide.
AmigaGuide is an early hypertext format, originally used by Commodore for their official developer documentation, but delivered as a standard component of AmigaOS 3.0 and up. It’s simple compared to modern HTML: it can’t display inline images or play background sounds, but you can create links to arbitrary files that are then displayed separately.
In the above screenshot, Ed is used to edit an ARexx script that utilizes the shared library for interfacing with datatypes to identify file formats.
via YellowPlastic