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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

AEF wrote:
> 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.
> 
Unix was meant to be easy to type!  Ease of learning it was definitely 
secondary if it was considered at all!!

If you are at all familiar with Unix, you know that the early pioneers 
worked with some very primitive teletype equipment, specifically, the 
model 33.  Those who have used the model 33 will understand, 
intuitively, the brevity of Unix commands.  For those who have not, the 
model 33 required, by modern standards, extreme force to operate the 
keyboard.  There was no tiny switch underneath the key cap; it was 
levers, wheels and gears!  There was only ONE case, uppercase!  I 
believe it was automagically converted to lower case and you had to 
"escape" anything you wanted left in uppercase.

There is no reason other than tradition to continue this barbarous 
practice but tradition is a powerful force.

> 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.
> 
A unix user need not concern himself with the underlying storage media!
VMS users are accustomed to seeing physical devices, each with its own 
filesystem.

In Unix, there is only ONE filesystem starting a "/" or the "root".  The 
actual files may be on the one and only disk or on several different 
disks.  Physical disks are mounted at "mount points" which look, to VMS 
users, like directories.  The directories used as mount points are 
normally empty since mounting a device on that mount point will overlay 
any directory entries present.  The Unix user need not concern himself 
with the details of which device(s) actually contain his files.

> 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. 

VMS can do that too!  Old line VMS people tend not to use it much but 
it's there.  See HELP PIPE.

> But VMS has some very cool things, too.

Indeed it does.  Starting with using English words like COPY, PRINT, 
DELETE, CREATE. . .  etc, as commands.  It requires a little more typing 
  but that is not a hardship for anyone who has learned to type and is 
not using a Model 33 teletype.

It makes the commands easy to remember.  The syntax is standard.  Rather 
than having each program parse its own command line, DCL does it for 
you. AIRC, you call a subroutine that returns the neatly parsed bits and 
pieces.  I didn't use it much.  It was easier to have the program prompt 
for the information it needed; if it needed anything.

<snip>