[Info-vax] VMS Features I Wish Linux Had

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at 9:20:59 AM UTC+12, VAXman- wrote:
> Huh?  You thought LIB$TPARSE was simpler than CLI/CLD?  I've done some
> extensive programming around LIB$T(ABLE_)PARSE (thousands of $STATEs/$TRANs
> statements) but I can tell you that when it comes to a having VMS command
> syntax in a program, it is CLI/CLD for me.  

TPARSE was quite versatile, and could be used for other things besides command-line parsing. Whereas CLD was only good for one thing.

So when it came to deciding where to spend precious brain cells (which are likely still dormant and might not need much to wake them up), the decision was easy.

I even wrote VAX PASCAL routines to generate TPARSE tables at run-time. (Why? Because it was nicer than MACRO assembler.) As I recall, there were two separate tables: I think the state definitions went in one, and the strings in the other. Everything was referred to via relative offsets, so the structures were entirely relocatable.

See, those brain cells are starting to wake up already...