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I'm not trying to give you a hard time, Brian. I appreciate people who present 'what if' ideas, and frankly I would love to find a way to do something to efficiently convert one language to another. But just like people language examples, at some point, it requires some 'understanding' of what the author intended:
English: The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
"Automatic" translation into Russian and back: The vodka is strong, but the beef is insipid.
CMD.EXE (and KIX32.EXE) can be so small for two reasons:
1. They are not trying to translate between two different sets of syntax rules.
2. All their parsing and syntax rules are 'compressed' into executable code.
I really like your idea for a DOS/KIX comparison FAQ. I have found comparisons between languages to be very helpful. I.e. The book, Unix for VMS Users. That would be an EXCELLENT way to go... especially if you covered some of the more subtle nuances of how a command is handled.
For instance, you could document the differences in how NET USE and USE handle combinations of adding, deleting, and "permanent" settings. It is those very differences that have contributed to the various "mapdrive" UDF's floating around out there.
Good call on that command line. I had a ball figuring out how to accomplish this recently for someone who had some permissions problems on just a few directories on a server, but he wanted to find *all* the directories with the same permissions. Of course, he had to do a little text processing on the output file, but he was eternally grateful for anything that kept him from having to manually look at over 7,500 directories.
NMM
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