[Info-vax] Learning VMS application programming

[JohnF]

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.

Yes, ansi standard C remains pretty much ansi standard C.
Couldn't hurt to start with that, just to get a taste of
the edit-compile-run-debug cycle. Everything's trivial
except, of course, if you have to learn yet another editor.
Beyond that, for ipc, shared memory, etc, you're eventually
going to definitely want to have
  http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/84final/4527/4527pro.html
which, along with all reference manuals, is free
for pdf download from
  http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/os84_index.html

> I have been reading through the docs.
By which I assume you mean the above? (though your "mostly in dcl"
remark suggests maybe you mean something else?)
> Much harder to read than third-party books,
Well, not much to say about that besides "tough" :).
But once you write one or two simple programs using
system services, and get a hang for the look-and-feel
of those manuals, they're pretty darn good.
In fact, better than 90% of the unix/linux man and info
pages I've personally read. You will eventually like
them very much. I guarantee it!

> BTW, I've been browsing through the OpenVMS Freeware stuff.
You might or might not find my online
  http://www.forkosh.com/sources/vmslib.c.html
helpful to look at.
   Note that at the bottom is a little test driver which
exercises those system service wrapper interfaces inside a
complete self-contained little main() program. You'd compile
in that test driver with -DTESTDRIVE on unix, and I'll leave
it as your first exercise to figure out how to do that on vms :)
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j at f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )