[Info-vax] Learning VMS application programming

[Paul Sture]

On 2014-09-04, wendellxe at yahoo.com <wendellxe 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.

Thanks for the background.  That really does help in trying to pitch answers
at an appropriate level.

> 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.

The training wasn't like that at all in my experience.  In the 70s (I
started in IT in 1977) there was a much more diverse set of operating
systems in use and employers didn't expect you to come fully versed in
whatever O/S and toolset they were using (though obviously they liked it
if you did and that was usually reflected in a better salary).   The offer
of appropriate training was standard for new starts.


A few points:

* Computer Science courses at university were relatively scarce; there
  wasn't the volume of graduates who knew anything about computers that
  there was later.  The computing facility at my university was part
  of the Maths department and mainly reserved for postgrad work.

* Because computers were so expensive, if you hadn't come across one in
  higher education, your place of employment was your first exposure to
  them.

* A typical employer didn't have the spare computer capacity to run
  training courses internally, nor allow you computer time for self-study.
  In my early PDP days we couldn't do any program compiler or linking
  during production hours.  Having your own terminal at a training centre
  was sheer luxury :-)

* Your employer might not even have the computer itself yet; we all did a
  boatload of IBM courses in early to mid-1980 in preparation for the shiny
  new mainframe that arrived that summer.

DEC and other mini manufacturers were competing with the mainframe
manufacturers (not just IBM back then) where taking a gazillion courses
was standard practice.   One of the competitive advantages of VMS was that
you could become productive with much less formal training.

Last but not least, DEC would throw in training credits with hardware
purchases, and even resellers were eligible for those credits. :-)

> So, there wasn't a tradition of making tutorial material or learning on
> your own. Is that kind of the subtext here?

There certainly was a tradition of learning on your own, but learning
from the documentation rather than by third party tutorials.  I learned a
lot by attacking the manuals during evening invoicing runs and backups.
 
> I have been reading through the docs. Much harder to read than
> third-party books, but that's usually the case, I've found. 

>From our perspective, it came as something of a shock that other folks
actually had to buy books our of their own pocket.  In the DEC world (not
just VMS but PDPs before that) we had got used to quality documentation
which contained just about all you needed to know.

To illustrate that point, as late as 1998 a colleague visited the company
"TCP/IP Guru" for a bit of advice and was amazed at the number of third
party books on the subject he had in his office.

> 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?

Which manuals are you looking at?  Once you get onto the compilers, you
want to hit the User Guides.  The Reference Manuals are pretty dry but
the User Guides have examples.

> 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.

ZIP/UNZIP can be used here.  unzip -a  "auto-convert any text files" will
convert to the line endings of the system you are running on.  If you 
have access to a VMS system with Apache (aka SWS Secure Web Server), there
is a DCL procedure which will convert multiple text files to Stream-LF.
Or someone could make a copy available to you :-)

-- 
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
If you own a jackhammer, every problem looks like hours of fun