[Info-vax] The best VMS features, was: Re: openvms renaming file

[Tim Sneddon]

John E. Malmberg <wb8tyw at qsl.net_work> wrote:
> On 5/29/2018 11:16 PM, Michael Moroney wrote:
>> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>> 
>>> On 2018-05-29, Michael Moroney <moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com> wrote:
>>>> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> BTW, has anyone asked you if TECO is going to be available on x86-64 ? :-)
>>>>
>>>> A major fan of TECO works for VSI and he will be sure it's in X86...
>> 
>>> That editor has now been around in one form or the other since the
>>> early 1960s - I wonder how much longer it will be around for ? :-)
>> 
>> Apparently that's the reason why the TECO code is so ugly. It's been
>> ported from one machine to another, possibly by a conversion program in
>> some cases, and by the time it made it to VAX the code was so ugly the
>> Alpha Macro-32 compiler wouldn't accept it, and nobody would (could?)
>> fix the code so that it would.  (It's VESTed on Alpha and the VESTed
>> Alpha code is AESTed on Itanic)
> 
> The TECO/IA64 port has bugs.  It crashes for me when I try to use it.
> 
> Someone gave me a pointer to a TECO implementation that works on IA64, 
> but I have misplaced it.

That might have been me.  TECO on IA64 is broken in the standard VMS
distribution.  However, it is possible to make it work after applying
the patches described here:

    ftp://ftp.endlesssoftware.com.au/pub/teco

The changes in here hugely increase performance and fix a number of
bugs that caused TECO to crash.  It also runs fast enough to execute
the VTEDIT macro.

> 
> I do not know how compatible C TECO was to the VMS supplied TECO.  Is 
> there a validation test?

I don't believe there is any of the protable TECOs that will run VTEDIT.

Regards, Tim.