[Info-vax] Access to _all_ VMS system services and library functions from DCL ?

[Craig A. Berry]

On Tuesday, July 11, 2017 at 9:37:47 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> There'll certainly be some folks that'll 
> never be pried off DCL and 32-bit and itemlists, and there'll be those 
> that adopt the newer approaches at varying paces. . .

Ain't that the truth.  Everything discussed in this thread as future and hypothetical and "if only" has been available in Perl on VMS for twenty years.  With the VMS::Process module, you can fetch one JPI item into a single value, or all of them at once into a hash.  Bitmaps are decoded into strings where possible. If VSI changes the maximum length of a username, your Perl code wouldn't need to change because the strings are stored as Perl scalar values (essentially a dynamic string descriptor on steroids).  Obviously the internals of the module would have to change, but the equivalent would be necessary with any other potential solution, such as with the JVM interfaces upon which Arne's example was based.

So I find somewhere between amusing and annoying the general tenor of this discussion, i.e., that getting at this stuff without using item lists is a bold new challenge when in fact it's a problem that was solved pretty well a couple of decades ago.