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

[AEF]

On Jan 29, 11:06 am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> AEF wrote:
> > On Jan 28, 11:44 am, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> >> In article <b9489278-4168-437b-85e5-fff095da5... at l38g2000vba.googlegroups.com>,
> >>         AEF <spamsink2... at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> >>> 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 atwww.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).
> >> As I have said in the past, (and aparently at least Michael agrees) it's
> >> all a matter of opinion as I find quite the opposite.
>
> > OK.
>
> >>>                       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?)
> >> It is to people who use Unix for a living.  And, apparently college
> >> freshman.
>
> > OK, it was late night when I've been posting these things. OK, it's
> > the one that's in the PATH. I'm just starting and for some reason I'm
>
> Not quite.  It's the one that occurs FIRST in the PATH!
>
> You can ask which version will be run.  The command, logically enough is
> "which".  "which mumble" will tell you /usr/sbin/mumble (or whatever
> mumble is found first in searching the path.
>
> > just not in the Unix PATH frame of mind yet. (Maybe it's in part
> > because I hate the PATH trains!) But why the multiple versions of some
> > commands? Why the following?
>
> > SYNOPSIS
> >      /usr/bin/ls  [-aAbcCdeEfFghHilLmnopqrRstuvVx1@] [file]...
>
> >      /usr/xpg4/bin/ls  [-aAbcCdeEfFghHilLmnopqrRstuvVx1@]
> >      [file]...
>
> >      /usr/xpg6/bin/ls  [-aAbcCdeEfFghHilLmnopqrRstuvVx1@]
> >      [file]...
>
> > Why three versions?
>
> How about because: in the beginning there was AT&T unix.  AT&T gave a
> copy to the Computer Science Department at Berkeley!  The comp sci
> students wrote their own versions of things and added entirely new
> things; and then there was Berkeley Unix (BSD).
>
> For the last thirty-five or forty years these two versions and their
> descendants have been exchanging genetic material in ways that would
> make a stock breeder blush!
>
> Every vendor has to make his Unix somehow "better" than the others which
> mean that things get rewritten and things get added.  Sometimes things
> got fixed.  Usually something else got broken.  Unix was never
> "designed" it just grew!
>
> >>> 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.
>
> You're not the only one.  But tradition is a powerful force!
>
> >>> Also, I find English words much more intuitive and actually mostly, if
> >>> not partly, self explanatory.
>
> Use VMS then.  I do!  I also use Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Solaris 10, and
> Red Hat Linux.  Sometimes a task is more easily done on one of these
> than on VMS.   Sometimes the reverse is true.
>
> I'll continue to use the tools that get the job done with a minimum of
> effort (and collateral damage) whatever their origin.

I do the same.

[...]

>
> >> bill
>
> >> --
> >> Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
> >> billg... at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
>
> > Ain't it the truth: Tyranny of the majority.
>
> >> University of Scranton   |
> >> Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>
>
> > AEF
>
>

AEF