[Info-vax] Learning VMS application programming

[mcleanjoh at gmail.com]

On Friday, September 5, 2014 9:12:29 AM UTC+10, wend... at yahoo.com wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for at least some comment.  Telling us what you are trying to do will probably generate a whole lot more advice.

My tip is to start with the C User Guide.  I don't know which one you'll need because I don't know if you are working on Vax, Alpha or Integrity hardware, so start at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/c/c_index.html and select your hardware variant, then on the next page select the "User Guide".

The User Guide has lots of examples (written in C pretty obviously) and probably covers a lot of what you'll need.