[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-04-08 19:15:00 +0000, Dave Froble said:

> Entertainment is fine.  Confusion, not so much.
> 
> I see you've chosen to ignore my little bit of entertainment in 
> response to your latest "annoyances".  Looking back, I missed an even 
> better response.  Should have been "Use Basic, it's in there ..."
> 
> For some of your annoyances, that's basically true, it's in there.

Even given it's clearly suited for what you're doing, BASIC can still 
be better.  As can C, C++ and the other languages.  And better 
integrated with OpenVMS.

I've done shedloads of work in BASIC over the years, and it's a 
reasonable choice for a number of applications.

BASIC lacks constructs for dealing with itemlists and other related 
OpenVMS APIs.  Its string descriptor support is reasonable for classic 
ASCII/MCS strings but is otherwise lacking for other string encodings, 
and for other types of descriptors. It'd be nice if I didn't have to 
drag along the string encoding for instance, as is the current case 
with C, C++ and BASIC.  As for itemlists in BASIC?  That leaves me in 
the same situation as C and C++ and Fortran, and having to manually 
construct these APIs.  And BASIC could really use an OO upgrade, but 
that's fodder for another discussion or three.



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