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

[JF Mezei]

On 15-01-21 09:25, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> 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,

2 questions:

1- Is it possible to get DCL to support modern quoting that causes less
irritation to Hoff ?

Is it possible that the quoting exagerations are not caused by the
quoting logic, but rather by the passing of arguments to other DCL
procedures which also then pass those arguments to others etc etc which
in the end forces on to ensure the arguments end up at the furthest
command procedure as a quoted string with possibly spaces in it ?

(as I recall, the LAT startup procedure required infinite supply of
quotes in the arguments.

Should that be fixed instead of the quoting mechanism ?  For instance,
DCL treating the content of a symbol as a single string unit and not try
to break it up into different arguments ?

$myarg = "chocolate mousse cake"
@myrecipe 'myarg

would result in myrecipe.com seeing 1 argument "chocolate mousse cake"
instead of seing 3 arguments.



2- DCL versions

How difficult would it be to do something like Unix and have the first
line of a DCL command procedure define the DCL flavour. This would allow
procedures that make use of new features, new argumebnt apssing etc to
exist alongside procedures that use the old DCL for compatibility purposes.