[Info-vax] Non-portable code

[Marc Van Dyck]

Jan-Erik Söderholm pretended :
> Marc Van Dyck wrote:
>
>> Jan-Erik Söderholm formulated on mercredi :
>>>
>>> Just so it's fully understood...
>>>
>>> Why not simply use ANALYZE/IMAGE ?
>>> What extra does your Pascal program give ?
>> 
>> The program is integrated
>> in DCL, you just type, for example "$ version acms" and it will return
>> a line "ACMS   ACMS V5.1", getting the information from the
>> executable associated to ACMS (in this case ACMSBOOT.EXE) in the
>> reference file.
>
> Sure. But the command "version" could just as will run a COM
> file doing exactly the same thing using ANAL/IMAGE.
>
>> I also added a /SYMBOL qualifier, so that you
>> could type "$ version acms /symbol=acms_ident" way before ANAL/IMAGE
>> had it.
>
> Yes, that might explain why one did that *then*, not why one
> would not use ANAL/IMAGE *today*.
>
>> (not counting the fun of doing it)
>
> Ah, now we are talking! Can't argue against that, can you ? :-)

Of course there is that. I have a dozen of utilities like that, that
are heavily used everywhere, and I'm the only one left in the company
to be able to maintain them. The pascal code that I have posted in
my original topic makes me look like a sorcerer here. But it's not
my main job, so I do that for, oh, 5 days per year perhaps, most of
the time between Xmas and new year because there is nothing else to
do at that time of the year anyway.

But there is not only that. A program will always be more robust than
a DCL procedure, specially if its input processing is made via the CLD
utility, like I always do. So convenient, and almost totally 
fool-proof.
Also, to develop programs, VMS has a very good debugger, which does not
exist for DCL procedures. And I don't believe I would be able to do
wildcard matching with character strings in DCL like I did with
STR$MATCH_WILD in my program. EXEs have lots of advantages over DCLs !

And finally, as I already mentioned, there is also the fact that those
tools are already used everywhere, so changing them would require a lot
of effort to adapt all the places where they are used, more than the
effort needed to maintain them.

-- 
Marc Van Dyck