There are  common routines for this  type of things, and  they don't know
why they  are being  called or  by whom,  so this  is just  not feasible.
Another thing is  that list management commands are a  typical example of
the kind of thing you may want  to write a short program to automate. You
want the program to have  predictable results, so context or registration
dependent syntax is not a good idea.
 
The  PASCAL commands  generally accept  options with  or without  opening
parenthesis, and support VMS-style  alternatives. For instance, with 1.8a
you can SET  XYZ REPRO/USER=*@* or SET XYZ/NOMAIL/FILES. I  don't want to
get into the business of maintaining parallel lists of one-character unix
options.
 
  Eric