[Info-vax] DCL's flaws (both scripting and UI)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-21 13:10:24 +0000, johnson.eric at gmail.com said:

> I would imagine that even Froble could concede that there was a time 
> that he looked forward to new features added to his trusty DEC Basic 
> toolset.
> I would hope that familiarity with that excitement could enable one to 
> understand why others might be drawn to the features of newer languages.

Or to the substantially updated and got-to-have-it versions of VMS, 
from the ancient times.   Outside of the folks that want or need 
Poulson-class servers, that's probably not V8.4-1H1.  Whether the 
x86-64 port or subsequent releases can add significant new features — 
beyond the platform port — probably depends on how big VSI can get and 
particularly on how much revenue they can realize from their initial 
VMS and LP releases and/or support.

As for the future of BASIC, it'd be interesting to see what might 
happen should VSI decide to overhaul DEC BASIC, adding object support, 
pointer support, garbage collection and maybe some other new features 
into the language.  This'd probably best follow the Visual Basic AS 
syntax for pointers, given the VB syntax is long established.  This 
won't draw all that many folks away from C, C++, Python or other 
higher-profile languages.  But the crowd using VB was and probably 
still is bigger than the crowd using VMS, l'd expect.

The flaws in DCL, however, remain.  It's clunky and confusing to use 
with its asymmetric quoting and its fondness for quoted quotes for 
various tasks, and that BASIC and Macro32 can solve various of these 
limitations — sort of, as BASIC doesn't have a good way to chain 
together a series of commands, short of spawning off DCL — won't draw 
new folks to VMS.

Now as to whether VSI can get to profitability and can then start 
seriously chasing what's available on other platforms, and can start 
growing the user base?  That's no small and no simple project, either.



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