[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[AEF]

On Feb 10, 9:57 am, Stephen Hoffman <seaoh... at hoffmanlabs.invalid>
wrote:
> On 2013-02-10 04:11:28 +0000, AEF said:
>
>
> > On Feb 8, 9:15 pm, Stephen Hoffman <seaoh... at hoffmanlabs.invalid>
> > wrote:
> >> On 2013-02-06 01:00:46 +0000, AEF said:
>
> >>> On Feb 5, 10:48 am, Stephen Hoffman <seaoh... at hoffmanlabs.invalid>
> >>> wrote:
[...]
>
> As I stated before:
>
> >> Logical names get abused far too often, largely because DCL lacks any
> >> sort of a generic preferences storage and retrieval mechanism, or an
> >> integrated key-value mechanism short of using (for instance) an RMS
> >> indexed file.
>
> >> This design inevitiably reminds me of using punch cards to store this
> >> data.  Sure, that works.  It's even superior to using logical names in
> >> a way.  But it's really ugly, it's a whole lot of work for what you
> >> get, and it's quite easy to make mistakes, and upgrades and cleanups
> >> can be a problem.  Unlike a deck of punch cards, logical names don't
> >> have a way to read the whole wad of keys and values — data — and see
> >> what's there, too.
>
> Working with a key-value store — Python, perl, most any compiled
> language — really shows the weaknesses of DCL and the available tools.
> bash would be somewhat of a pain in the rump here, though awk
>
> For an overview of what a key-value store is, see associative arrays
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array>.  At its core, this
> also gets back to the hackery that is the "array support" in DCL.  The
> easiest way to implement that (in DCL) being something like an indexed
> file, or using ampersand substitution.  DCL is good at chaining
> together invocations, but far from effective as a generic
> text-processing tool, and it's not good at storing and retrieving data
> through a means other than logical names or symbols, both of which have
> limits.  Python, Perl and Lua can do much better here.  bash — which
> lacks key-value support in most any version I've worked with — does
> better than DCL with its (limited) array support.  Compiled languages,
> too, can store data.  (Though that's also often a whole lot of work in
> the older versions and older languages found on VMS.)
>
> Basically, logical names usually end in pain when applied at scale, or
> when subject to collisions, and for the sorts of corner-cases that can
> arise around tool upgrades and tool failures.
>
> --
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

For TO.COM I wanted to be able to use short-hand aliases for disks and
directories in file-specs in other commands. I don't see any
alternative short of DCL symbols, which wouldn't have worked as well.

I'll try, however, to avoid using them this way in future projects.

AEF