[Info-vax] Why so much Unix envy?
Bill Gunshannon
bill at server3.cs.scranton.edu
Tue Sep 2 09:27:43 EDT 2014
In article <ltv3ms$if4$1 at dont-email.me>,
Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
> On 2014-08-30, wendellxe at yahoo.com <wendellxe at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Saturday, August 30, 2014 4:48:50 AM UTC-7, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>
>>> 4. Unix has a vast ecosystem that VMS does not.
>>
>> That seems to be the main reason people are pointing to. What started
>> me thinking about this was hearing that HP engineering were trying to
>> implement fork(), completely contrary to the nature of VMS.
>>
>> Although, the Unix shell provides some convenient features. Did the DEC
>> folks consciously avoid providing that kind of flexibility?
>>
>
> I think it was probably more about a different engineering criteria
> which remained unchanged as the years passed.
>
> Don't forget that when DCL was created, Unix was not the major player
> it is now and DEC was looking at it's previous operating systems for
> ideas.
>
> There were also some design decisions made which hampered future
> flexibility. For example, DCL line editing in VMS is done as part of
> the terminal driver and the terminal driver does not have the ability
> to wrap around lines (unlike every other shell today including MS-DOS).
>
> I've made a number of requests over the years (including enhancement
> requests as part of a support contract) and have always been told the
> terminal driver code is too complicated to alter and risk breaking.
>
> That's a situation which simply would not exist in any other OS today.
>
> OTOH, for the time, DCL was a nicely structured command language and,
> at the time, it was a nicely elegant thing. Unfortunately, time has
> moved on but DCL has not.
>
>>> It also helped that Unix was implemented in an architecture independent
>>> language (flawed as that language is).
>>
>> I thought it funny when I read that Dave Cutler hated Unix but liked C.
>> Anyone know specifically what he didn't like about Unix and was aiming
>> for in his implementation of VMS in C (Windows NT)?
>
> I don't know about Cutler on Unix, but the C comment is interesting.
I think the majority of things we hear about St. David are myths with
nothing to do with reality.
>
> For some time now, I've been moving to the idea that what we really need
> is a type safe version of C with Wirthian style syntax.
>
> I'm not talking about something as huge as Ada, but something that is
> "C done right"; a nice simple language, comparable in functionality to
> C and which allows the safe implementation of the core libraries that
> our computing infrastructure is built on. I've actually been exploring
> some ideas for fun about how such a language might look.
Had it, ages ago. Didn't fly.
>
> And before anyone says you can do that in C, but you just "need to be
> careful", my response is that's the kind of macho nonsense which has
> given us a computing infrastructure built on quicksand instead of
> concrete.
You can do wonders with cleaning up C code now by looking at the warnings
and fixing what they warn you about. Instead, most programmers just turn
off all the warnings to get a "clean" compile.
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>
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