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

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <54bfc7cc$0$41724$c3e8da3$5d8fb80f at news.astraweb.com>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
>On 15-01-21 09:25, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>
>> The flaws in DCL, however, remain.  It's clunky and confusing to use 
>> with its asymmetric quoting and its fondness for quoted quotes for 
>> various tasks,
>
>2 questions:
>
>1- Is it possible to get DCL to support modern quoting that causes less
>irritation to Hoff ?
>
>Is it possible that the quoting exagerations are not caused by the
>quoting logic, but rather by the passing of arguments to other DCL
>procedures which also then pass those arguments to others etc etc which
>in the end forces on to ensure the arguments end up at the furthest
>command procedure as a quoted string with possibly spaces in it ?
>
>(as I recall, the LAT startup procedure required infinite supply of
>quotes in the arguments.
>
>Should that be fixed instead of the quoting mechanism ?  For instance,
>DCL treating the content of a symbol as a single string unit and not try
>to break it up into different arguments ?
>
>$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.

It's software; most anything is possible.  A "$! DCL2", for example, would
not break existing functionality but there's already been complaint in this
thread about some functions working in comments.  I suppose it's fair but it
is no different than the shebang stuff in unix shells.

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