[Info-vax] DCL Syntax

[Craig A. Berry]

On 8/29/18 9:04 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

But where *nix uses -r or -R, VMS just uses recursive filespecs. Where
you would say grep -R on Unix, you don't say SEARCH/RECURSIVE on VMS --
just SEARCH [...].