[Info-vax] Notable VMS "feature"

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-01-27 12:54, VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> In article <n89ec2$1bpl$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, George Cornelius <cornelius at charter.NOWHERE.net> writes:
>> On 01/26/2016 06:31 AM, Jess Goodman wrote:
>>> On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3:40:18 PM UTC-5, gcorn... at charter.net wrote:
>>>> gcornelius at charter.net wrote:
>>>>> gcornelius at charter.net wrote:
>>>>>> The rest is of course stolen from you.
>>>>
>>>> Except the part where I forgot the parentheses
>>>> about istat.and.1 in the if statement.
>>>>
>>>> I believe the simplified form
>>>>
>>>> 	if (istat.and.1)  ! no .eq.1
>>>>
>>>> would work, though, so no need to have compared
>>>> the results of the .and. to 1.
>>>>
>>>> George
>>
>>> Actually in VMS Fortran (and in DCL) only the low-order bit of a
>>> logical value determines if it is TRUE or FALSE.  I remember this
>>> as "truth is odd".  And since for VMS status values "success is
>>> odd" you can code this way:
>>
>> And I code that way in DCL. In Fortran, which is
>> a standards-based language, I have begun to think
>> that even if it is low bit only it is best to make
>> it explicit.
>
> Then wouldn't be be more "explicit) with...
>
>          INCLUDE '($STSDEF)'
>
>          if (istat.and.STS$M_SUCCESS)

Isn't there a mask that contains all the bits that should be checked for 
status? And then you should really mask istat with that, and check if 
the masked value equals success?

I don't have any VMS FORTRAN documentation around to check what those 
masks and values might be called...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
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