CompuServe Messages

You're definitely right on 2 things, that all the commands that avail themselves of the "wildcard function call" will all have the same library call and that a shell expansion provides a consistent user interface. The relation between the function call overhead and the actual working code size of the program would be minimal and therefore, in my book, negligible. If a system function call is available (if you want to consider ARP part of the OS) then it provides the same consistency as the shell expansion. As far as whether you prefer shell expansion or an explicit library call, it seems to be six of one and a half dozen of the other as far as I can tell. I seem to prefer the function call on a matter of principle (the command having control over its own command line format), but in real life I can't think of an example to decide the issue one way or the other. This is, of course, considering ARP as part of the standard system, which it isn't "out of the box". The standard AmigaDOS commands are goners in this regard.