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

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <keeb7i$e15$1 at dont-email.me>,
	Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
> On 2013-01-31 17:38:45 +0000,   VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG said:
> 
>> In article <kee7oh$m45$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman 
>> <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
>>> On 2013-01-31 16:32:44 +0000,   VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG said:
>>> 
>>>> Or, skip the myriad excursions through LIB$CVT_TIME and LIB$CVT_DTIME, and
>>>> let DCL do one of the things it does best...
>>>> 
>>>> $ filename = filenameprefix+"_"+F$cvtime(,"COMPARISON")-"-"-"-"-"
>>>> "-":"-":"-"."+".dmp"
>>> 
>>> Yes.  That's definitely better than what I'd posted[1].
>>> 
>>> But you're not going to convince me that DCL is superior to bash here;
>>> that printf-style notation is just plain handy.
>> 
>> I never said that.  I was trying to get the focus on the scripting lingo's
>> features and not all of the utilities it can invoke.
> 
> 
> AFAIK, no command line interpreter and no shell is ever intended to be 
> used in isolation.
> 
> The whole point of a CLI or of a shell is allow scripting and to allow 
> gluing together various executables.
> 
> IMO, Unix just happens to be better at that gluing-together than is 
> VMS, albeit with the Unix shells typically being more cryptic.  

Forgetting everyone here's dislike for the old Unix naming convention
as utility programs (like sed, awk or ls) are not part of the shell,
just what is cryptic about any Unix shell?

>                                                                 That's 
> as much due to the general philospophy as anything else.  Unix 
> classically does many small bits stitched together, where VMS does big 
> and all-encompassing monolithic solutions.  Now is Unix perfect here?  
> Nope.  There's no metadata around what data is shoved through the pipes 
> (such as character encodings, for instance), so tossing certain sorts 
> of data through a pipe can get... "interesting".  But then this is also 
> the sort of solution that's seldom implemented on VMS.
> 
> 
>> 
>>> [1] Pedantic: what you've posted does not produce exactly same output.
>>> It's very close, but not the same.
>> 
>> $ filename = 
>> filenameprefix+"_"+F$fao("!19AS",F$cvtime(,"COMPARISON"))-"-"-"-"-" 
>> "-":"-":"+".dmp"
> 
> Yeah.  Or add the prefix and the underscore into the f$fao, as that 
> avoids clobbering caracters in the prefix.

And tell me how the above is not cryptic?  Just what is the difference
between the first dash and the second?  Or the third?  And would anyone
normal determine that?  :-)

 
bill 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>