[Info-vax] Removing the leading $ from commands in a new DCL language

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-05-03, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> wrote:
> On 2015-05-03, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>
> wrote:
>> On 2015-05-02, glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>>> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> wrote:
>>>> My thoughts were to come up with a way to drop the leading $ from
>>>> commands while retaining the ability to have inline data being fed
>>>> to a program.
>>>  
>>>> I did think the same as you, but I was also wanting to devise some
>>>> mechanism which didn't require the script writer to specify some end
>>>> of data sequence which the script writer needs to know isn't going
>>>> to be seen within the data.
>>>
>>> You can already do that.  You only need the $ on the line after
>>> the last input line.  As far as I know, you can put that $ on
>>> a line by itself. 
>>>
>>
>> And what if there's a $ as the first character of the data ? :-)
>>
>> (That's the point I was making above.)
>
> You use $DECK and $EOD for that.  There was one occasion many moons ago
> where I needed it; it might have been in the context of talking to an
> IBM via RJE.
>

I know, but since it's not required most of the time people don't use
it until it is required (hopefully not as the result of finding out the
hard way. :-))

Also, if the data has $ EOD in it, then you have to switch to yet another
variant (and you need to pick a string which doesn't appear at the start
of any of the lines of data).

In Unix shell land, things work ok with certain syntax shortcuts most
of the time until you trip over things like filenames with a leading
dash. At this point you have to switch to another variant to handle this
(which works in the general case as well, but since it's extra characters
many people don't bother - at least until they hit one of these issues
for the first time.)

This is the DCL version of that. I was trying to come up with a way in
a rewritten DCL to avoid all this faffing around and have the same
behaviour regardless of what the inline data looks like.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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