[Info-vax] GUIDs (Re: HP wins Oracle Itanium case)

[Craig A. Berry]

In article <k1651d$h31$1 at dont-email.me>,
 Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:

> The GUID is very handy for tasks involving collision avoidance, or (in 
> some cases) for making life somewhat more difficult for folks that are 
> attacking your applications or your system.  OpenVMS necessarily uses 
> GUIDs on Itanium (that's a requirement of EFI), and now includes a 
> system service API for generating GUIDs; the $create_uid call.

Is this what the lexical function F$UNIQUE() is based on?  It looks 
like that returns 32 nibbles:


$ say f$unique()
2A06310A110000B411E1ED50E1317135

which would be consistent with the octaword documented in:

$ help system_serv $create_uid

System_Services

  $CREATE_UID

       Generates a universally unique identifier (UID).

       Format

         SYS$CREATE_UID  uid

       C Prototype

         int sys$create_uid  (unsigned int uid [4]);
     



    Additional information available:

    Arguments

System_Services $CREATE_UID Subtopic? arg

SYSTEM_SERVICES

  $CREATE_UID

    Arguments

       

      uid

         OpenVMS usage:uid
         type:         octaword (unsigned)
         access:       write only
         mechanism:    by reference
         Address of an octaword in which the unique identifier is 
returned
         to the calling process.