[Info-vax] DCL, was: Re: Microkernel

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-08-17 11:47:29 +0000,   VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG said:

> In article <k0jvkr$r1q$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman 
> <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
>> 
>> Last I looked at this, there was a cha-cha to get the code remapped
>> from P0 to P1 space, and some other arcana.
> 
> There's now an IAC${V,M}_P1DIRECT.

That'd be handy.  IIRC, KP threads was retrofit into DCL.  The old 
home-grown stuff didn't survive Itanium.

> The fun part is getting from EXEC
> to SUPERVISOR mode and hoping all goes well. ;)  Debugging there is an
> interesting exercise in hair pulling.

So that's why there were some bald heads in engineering.  Never made 
that connection.  :-)

I usually ended up using the ring buffers, broadcasts and (depending on 
the code) delta or xdelta, and/or an SDA extension.

The VMS inner-mode debugging infrastructure was (in comparison to what 
I'm using on other boxes) weak, and somewhat scattershot.

>> And the new CLI will want to be field the callbacks arriving from the
>> sys$cli routine, no?
> 
> If you implement your own CLI would you necessarily need the features
> of the DCL SYS$CLI?  Sure, you could implement your own callback but
> would that same limiting mechanism suffice?


IIRC, sys$cli was the path for spawning processes and for a few other 
operations, so it wasn't really what I'd consider an optional API for a 
CLI.


>> I'm not particularly interested in extending DCL and enhancing the DCL
>> buffer, myself.  I'll leave that to other folks.  To me, a different
>> shell would be more interesting.
> 
> I'd toyed with the idea of taking the GNV bash and making it a proper
> CLI but I've been busy with other projects that provide slightly more
> income than freeware. ;)


Or with other projects with a perceived higher long-term payback than 
working on OpenVMS Freeware, or however the MBAs phrase that stuff.

It'd be nice if somebody tossed the old DEC/shell code onto the 
Freeware web site.  :-)


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