>It seems to me  that a network should have one set of  commands for using its
>services  regardless  of  which  operating  system is  used  to  access  that
>network. Of  course, thi problem  is also true of  The Internet to  a degree.
 
"The ONE true and good set? But what then of progress? Or have
 we reached nirvana now already?"
 
I don't think anyone would argue about the truth of these two statements :
 
	(1)	There are a strictly finite number of operations which
		a particular type of application will support
 
	(2)	These operations are common to all of these applications,
		although the particular names, commands, syntaxes and
		descriptions will vary
 
It is only a matter of time until someone gets around to identifying every
one of these possibilities and explicitly supporting them - much as modern
modems utilize their own command set, to provide extensions specific to
the manufacturer, but also recognize the Hayes AT command set as a fairly
good general-purpose description of all the things you might want to do
with a modem, or printers support their own page description language yet
also offer Postscript support, as a pretty good general-purpose PDL that
does pretty much what everyone wants a PDL to do.
 
At that point in time - I'd guess within five years - this whole issue will
be moot ... you'll tell it what you want and it'll figure it out.
 
How many ways can you ask for a file, anyway ?
 
-- richard