[Info-vax] RMS record metadata, was: Re: Re; Spiralog, RMS Journaling (was

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-06-22, VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG <VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote:
> In article <nke08c$abk$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>>On 2016-06-21, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>>> On 2016-06-21 14:16:50 +0000, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com said:
>>>
>>>> Of these, none is worth keeping. Except maybe that last one.
>>>
>>> Your list missed one: if RMS is ripped out, then large chunks of 
>>> OpenVMS itself and more than a little third-party and end-user code 
>>> either gets rewritten. or an RMS analog layer gets written.  That 
>>> latter approach and that latter effort goes nowhere near forward 
>>> progress, either.  There are a lot of RMS system service calls around 
>>> in VSI and third-party and end-user source code, and a lot of source 
>>> code with in-built RMS-based assumptions.
>>>
>>
>>But OTOH, if you wanted to build something which looked like VMS but
>>without maintaining strict VMS compatibility, RMS as it currently
>>stands is something which would be ripped out with a vengeance.
>>
>>You would need something RMS like in a new VMS, but it needs to be a
>>procedural subroutine style API interface, not a control block interface.
>>There's way too much direct exposure of low level details to VMS user
>>applications; that kind of thing needs hiding behind an abstraction
>>layer which does some of the boilerplate stuff for you.
>
> Which is what many of the HL langages do in their file handling statements.
> An OPEN statement with filename is fairly abstracted from the control block
> interface of RMS.

And for features not supported by HL languages, a set of consistent
library routine not only simplifies things for the caller but greatly
decreases a developer's learning curve when switching from one HLL to
another.


-- 
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