[Info-vax] Learning VMS application programming

[wendellxe at yahoo.com]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 1:27:30 PM UTC-7, wend... at yahoo.com wrote:
> I've been looking for a tutorial book on VMS programming...

Thanks for the comments so far. It's a relief to hear that RMS operation is mostly transparent. I was thinking of starting out with some text munging utilities, figuring it should be easy if I stuck to C standard lib calls.

I've been getting a feeling of cultural dissonance. There seems to be the assumption that I'm going to need a lot of help. Developing in *nix, I generally expect to find sufficient resources to go forward largely on my own. I've got Kerrisk's _The Linux Programming Interface_ and Stevens & Rago's _Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment_ on my desk. Between those and some select samples of open source projects, I expect to be able to figure out just about anything that doesn't involve proprietary interfaces.

I read something about development in the DEC days, when it was assumed that if you could afford a VMS system, you could afford a DEC training course to learn VMS programming. So, there wasn't a tradition of making tutorial material or learning on your own. Is that kind of the subtext here?

I have been reading through the docs. Much harder to read than third-party books, but that's usually the case, I've found. Why are almost all the code samples in DCL? Isn't that kind of like having a Windows systems book with all the code in DOS batch script?

BTW, I've been browsing through the OpenVMS Freeware stuff. The files are all in VMS format and I don't have a conversion utility on Linux, so I have to wait until I'm on a Windows machine. There really ought to be a Perl/Python script for this.