[Info-vax] VMS Features I Wish Linux Had

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Friday, June 10, 2016 at 3:37:26 PM UTC+12, I wrote:
> While there were benefits to the Unix way of doing things, there were
> also limitations. And some of those limitations carry right through to
> Linux systems today.

Just thought of another one: access to the command-line arguments. For some reason, all *nix systems pass these as arguments to main() as though it were a procedure call. So if you have a separate command-line-parsing library, you have to pass argc and argv through to it explicitly, it cannot get hold of it directly from some global location, like you can under VMS.

On the other hand, having the command-line presplit into words is very convenient, unlike DCL. Also I could never figure out how to get things like lowercase characters to be passed cleanly to a VMS program: put quotes around them, and the quotes get passed to the program as well.