[Info-vax] DCL Syntax

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/29/2018 9:54 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 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.

Given that *nix uses -r or -R then I guess a few people would have
guessed.

Arne