[Info-vax] portable sequential file formats (was: Re: Couple of questions on VMS -> world)

[mcleanjoh at gmail.com]

On Monday, March 16, 2015 at 8:30:06 PM UTC+11, li... at openmailbox.org wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Mar 2015 20:54:04 -0700 (PDT)
> dodecahedron99--- via Info-vax <info-***@rbnsn.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Friday, March 6, 2015 at 8:20:06 PM UTC+11, li... at openmailbox.org
> > wrote:
> > > Thanks. I am brand new to VMS so the question was aimed at getting the
> > > info I want to get off the disk in the quickest most painless way.
> > > Eventually I hope to be able to do everything related to VMS from VMS
> > > but for now I am more able to do things in UNIX, Linux etc.
> > 
> > Wow, another new person to VMS :-)
> 
> Apparently it's not going to last ;-)
> 
> > There seems to be a growing number of people lately (not huge but hey,
> > any increase is a good thing)
> 
> For me I'm so fed up with Intel's neverending screwups and I don't like
> UNIX very much. I'm a developer for my job and also in my vanishing spare
> time for fun, so I was looking for another platform that was neither UNIX,
> Linux, nor Windows and runs on non-Intel hardware. I thought looking into
> other hardware platforms would be a pleasant way to spend the little free
> time I have. I didn't know VMS was still around and I didn't pay attention
> to it when it was more popular.
> 
> > Welcome to the world of VMS. It's an interesting world and a great OS
> > that admittedly needs revamping on some areas (a lot of areas?). There's
> > LOTS of work to be done, your contribution will be greatly appreciated
> 
> I have no contribution to make, clearly, especially if things are going to
> Intel. I'm impressed that the compilers on VMS are serious good stuff and
> I'm interested to find out about the VAX and Alpha since I never had
> interest in them back in the day and my interests have broadened a little.
> As long as the emulators work I can see trying to learn a little VMS.
> 
> > I think, what the VMS community would like to see is not so much unix
> > tools merely ported over to VMS with the unix philosophy intact but to
> > see many of the good unix things ported to VMS but done the VMS way,
> > which as you'll discover, normal means with robustness and options in
> > mind and with great supporting documentation. It's the VMS way to be
> > consistent, which is why VMS folk tend to get frustrated with unix (or I
> > do) with different command switches for different commands
> 
> Are you saying they get frustrated because the switches are inconsistent
> across commands? I find UNIX sloppy and poorly thought out because there
> are simply too many options for things. It seems half or 3/4 of the
> bugfixes end up as new command line switches. But that's just the tip of
> the iceberg. UNIX wasn't ever designed, it just happened. And I really
> don't like that.
> 
> -- 
> Please DO NOT COPY ME on mailing list replies. I read the mailing list.
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Unix suffers from inconsistency in a lot of areas and Linux is a whole lot worse.

One simple example is lack of consistency in each command.  You typically find that a few alpha characters were related to what the program might do but the rest of the switches were just "we need another flag".  And even the commands are inconsistent with 'tar' and 'find' having odd formats (and even my Linux book says so).

Some Linux documentation is okay but some is atrocious; it just depends on who wrote it because there seems to be no standards and no overall co-ordinator.  Sure you can try to find things on the Internet by the code samples you find can be in lots of different languages and are more "I did it this way" than explaining what's going on.

With VMS you'll get pretty good consistency, good documentation and commands that correspond pretty well to English  (none of this 'mv' for renaming).

Play around with VMS for a while and you'll see a different way to do things, one that's more user-friendly.