[Info-vax] "Shanghai Stock Exchange" and OpenVMS

[AEF]

On Jan 28, 1:46 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> AEF schrieb:
>
> > New! From IDG books: DOS for Dummkopfs.
>
> That should be "Dummköpfe", but Umlauts are not everybody's
> strong points.

That's what it is in English. I even checked at www.webster.com. Do
you expect me to write "Deutschland" instead of "Germany"? "Republique
francaise" instead of "France"?

> Back to the point: Neither VMS Help nor Unix man pages
> are appropriate for learning either OS from scratch.

The VMS User's manual is.

> They are meant as a reminder for forgotten keywords and such.
> If you have no clue about those OS, both help systems
> are next to useless.

> I had to work on VMS before I knew Unix and found
> VMS, its filesystem and its HELP less intuitive.
> So Unix was a progress.

I find the man pages dense and visually difficult to read (an example
of poor typography). And the ones I have usually show several versions
of the same command with the differences specified in the name of the
command via different paths. You know: path1/cp, path2/cp, etc., where
path1 and path2 may be very similar in appearance. Which one is the
one I will be running if I just specify cp? (This is intuitive?)

Someone at work showed me a website which reformmated the man pages
into something much easier to read. Can't be just me who finds the
original man pages visually difficult to read.

Also, I find English words much more intuitive and actually mostly, if
not partly, self explanatory. I don't find that to be the case for 1-
and 2-letter commands and options. VMS commands and qualifiers and
keywords and such are mostly self-evident as to what they more or less
do or specify, aside from the fine details.

VMS terms are like those in photography: What does the enlarger do? It
enlarges (the image)! What does the developer do? It develops film or
photographic paper. What does the focusing knob do? What does the stop
bath do? It stops the developer from developing. The fixer bath
"fixes" the film or print so that you can turn on the light without
destroying the image. And then there's the print washer and the print
dryer. Can you guess what they do? Now suppose they were instead named
by Unix type abbreviations. You'd have no or little idea what any of
them are or do without looking them up. Now, admittedly, the existing
photographic terms aren't fully self-explanatory, but at least you get
a pretty good idea of what they do (well, to varying degrees). OK,
"lens" isn't self-explanatory at all; you have to learn that one! And
"focusing" may be a challenge for some.

Well, I'd think the photographic terms, as they currently exist, are
more intuitive, right?

The file systems are another story. I haven't learned how you can have
different disks in the same single file system. As a user I suppose
that's fine, but in VMS the system manager can set up logical names to
reference directories so that the user (or even the programmer in many
cases) need not be concerned with what the underlying device is.

Being intuitive is not the end-all be-all. What can you do with the OS
is also important. Of course we _were_ discussing looking stuff up,
but you referred to "progress", which opens up a whole new can of
worms.

Some things in Unix I find very cool, like using output of one program
as input for another. But VMS has some very cool things, too.

> And, since you mentioned physics labs a few posts ago:
> in these facilities one usually has a local primer
> for newbies. Anyway one will need only a very small
> subset of an OSs capabilities to do physics work.

It's only reasonable anywhere a user starts work to have a local
source of how to get started, be it a tutorial session; a newbie
manual, "local guide" (Latex style name), a primer, or whatever you
want to call it; or something else. And that's true more generally:
When you start a job, someone shows you around, right? And show's you
the ropes, so to speak, right? And what you're expected to do, right?

AEF