[Info-vax] Learning VMS application programming

[Bob Gezelter]

On Thursday, September 4, 2014 7:12:29 PM UTC-4, wend... at yahoo.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 1:27:30 PM UTC-7, wend... at yahoo.com wrote:
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> > I've been looking for a tutorial book on VMS programming...
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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?
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> 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?
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> 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.

Wendy,

Most assuredly NOT. There was never a presumption that anyone attended the DEC training classes. Actually, when the *IX books started appearing, I clearly remember the comment "Why buy a book, when the documentation set is relatively well-written?"

Personally, I never attended any DEC training, with the exception of some internals workshops at the national user group symposia. By that point, I was a systems programmer of several years standing.

Since I started on VAX/VMS 1.0, we did much of our preliminary work using the three volume original Handbook, which may have totaled 500 pages.

As to the use of DCL, the examples you are likely seeing are examples of command-based tasks. In that event, you are probably not reading the correct manual. The language user guides are probably a better place to start, with dives into the details starting with the Programming Concepts manuals (Hint: The programming language-specific Guides are packaged with the compilers, not the general documentation set).

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com