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

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/22/15 6:47 AM, "VAXman- "@SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> In article <m9puk0$krr$1 at dont-email.me>, "Craig A. Berry" <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> writes:
>> On 1/21/15 8:25 AM, 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
>>
>> SQL and XQuery and Visual Basic (and probably lots of other languages
>> I'm not acquainted with) double up quotes to quote them just like DCL
>> does. There's nothing especially clunky, confusing, or arcane about it.
>> This way of doing things has coexisted with languages that use an escape
>> character for many years and clearly neither way has won out.
>
> Finally, a voice of reason.
>

And I forgot to mention that PowerShell also has similar quoting rules
to DCL: <https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd315325.aspx>.

Perhaps Hoff's comment was about symbol interpolation (e.g. "''foo'")
and not quoting per se. That probably is unique to DCL, at least the
"asymmetric" aspect of it, but again, it's just another way of doing it
and has never produced any friction for me when using DCL. The
alternative is to prefix every symbol with a sigil, but that brings its
own cognitive load and requires extra syntax to disambiguate in some
circumstances.