[Info-vax] PC/VT Keyboarrd Mapping

[John E. Malmberg]

On 6/26/2016 12:20 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> On Sunday, June 26, 2016 at 12:20:56 PM UTC-4, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2016-06-26 15:39:57 +0000, John Reagan said:
>>
>>> It might have to do with some DECC$ logicals I set.
>>
>> Nuke those from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure those logical
>> names won't continue to derail unrelated applications.
>>
>
> We are doing some CRTL work right now (adding stdint.h, adding
> missing  stuff to other headers, untangling the mess inside math.h,
 > etc.). There are about 1/3rd of the logicals that I'm tempted to
 > remove and pick a 'mandatory default'. I don't think anybody would
 > know (but then again, those probably aren't the ones screwing people 
over).
>
> And some, like this one being discussed, should have never seen the
> light of day. A new feature was added to the CRTL to make access()
> smarter. Most folks might even call it a bug fix (I would). Why make it
> default to 'off'? Why give you the option to return to the old behavior?
> We don't invent logical names in other areas to selectively un-do a bug
> fix! At the minimum, I'll make sure the default for this one turns into
> 'enabled' (which is what I assumed it would be all along).

The issue is probably that many times a buggy behavior got fixed in the 
VMS CRTL, it broke some significant customer code that was depending on 
that bug.

After a few rounds of that, a team can get gun shy at making a fixed 
behavior a default.

There is a big mess there.  And the thing do do might be to freeze 
decc$shr and create a new decc$vsi_shr that is expected to follow the C 
standards and not use run-time feature settings.

The big transition issue for this is that there are a number of really 
bad VMS CRTL behaviors that should be fixed if you are splitting off a 
fixed copy.

* Some feature and compile time defines are to enable fixed behaviors 
that default to broken.

* Some feature and compile time defines are to enable broken behaviors 
that default to fixed.

* And there are some a few that are needed to change from Unix to VMS 
behaviors that rarely need to be run-time behaviors, but are not 
available as compile time behaviors.

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net_work