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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/11/2017 12:14 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 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.
Just to be clear.

Nobody AFAIK in this thread had any doubts that it was possible
to write a plugin/module/whatever to enable a scripting language
to use a system service with item lists.

The discussion was whether it was possible to have a scripting
language where one could manually setup an item list structure and get
it send over to the system service.

Are Perl doing the first or the second?

Arne