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

[mcleanjoh at gmail.com]

On Tuesday, July 11, 2017 at 7:54:56 AM UTC+10, John Reagan wrote:

> Some of that data is expensive to obtain.  I don't think you want SYS$GETJPI to collect all possible data just so you can check the account name or CPU time consumed.  And the layout then gets fixed for all time so the OS would have an even harder time to expand the username beyond 12 chars for example.

Even just handing back in a structure what's cheap would surely be an improvement over using itemlists that are messy to set up and require the system service to pick its through an itemlist, determining what's wanted, checking the access to memory each time and then finding/copying each value.

Maybe there's a separate structure for the more expensive items, especially if they are associated, or maybe they stay as item lists.

I don't see it as an either-or situation.  I just see structures and copies of multiple contiguous items out of their internal data structures as being helpful to users and to VMS.