[Info-vax] DCL Syntax

[Craig A. Berry]

On 8/29/18 5:46 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 8/29/2018 2:45 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 08/29/2018 02:33 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> On 2018-08-28 18:54:54 +0000, John Reagan said:
>>>> You need the /TREE qualifier for DELETE to match the behavior. 
>>>> (Personally, it should have been /RECURSIVE and not /TREE but nobody 
>>>> asked me)
>>>
>>> The use of /TREE was likely related to one of the more common tools 
>>> used for this purpose: DELTREE.
>>>
>>> And yes, /RECURSIVE would likely have been a better and more obvious 
>>> choice here.
>>>
>>> You and the other folks at VSI are also in a position to do something 
>>> about that and about other DCL syntax, too.
>>
>> Yes, but considering the potential impact on existing already
>> written procedures is it worth making little cosmetic changes
>> like this when everyone (even me) understood the old meaning?
> 
> Add /RECURSIVE, document /RECURSIVE, remove /TREE from documentation
> but keep /TREE working.

No one with any sense would use anything except MCR DFU DELETE/TREE for
this purpose; it's massively faster than the DELETE/TREE implemented by
HPE. Most likely the prior art of DFU and the rmtree() functions in
Perl, Python and elsewhere influenced the choice of the /TREE qualifier.
I for one would never have imagined or guessed /RECURSIVE, but I might
have eventually read the documentation and eventually remembered that on
VMS it's different just for the sake of being different. And then gone
back to using the better, non-standard tools.