[Info-vax] C99 updates to CRTL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/30/2019 1:27 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2019-07-30 kl. 17:12, skrev Dave Froble:
>> On 7/30/2019 9:58 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> App management and configuration with logical names—other than for
>>> device redirection, and that usage is only marginally better than app
>>> config data—is among the more fetid coding practices and endemic on
>>> OpenVMS.
>>>
>>> Logical names as configuration data storage?  Hacks all the way down.
>>> Isolation by convention. Parsing by assumption.  Architecture by
>>> accretion. Documentation by omission.
>>>
>>> But I'm feeling polite today.  And yes, I have used logical names for
>>> configuration data. Having encountered better configuration data storage
>>> schemes else-platform, now usually whilst holding my nose, too.
>>
>> The "logical name" rant is usually interesting.  But, this time, I 
>> wondered just how "guilty" I've been.  So I took a look.
>>
>> I use logical names to refer to mailbox names, which gives me a 
>> defined name for something that will usually (always) have a unique 
>> name each time the mailbox is set up.
>>
>> I use logical names to refer to devices, such as disk drives, the 
>> printer LTA port, MODEM_PORT (old cruft no longer used), and such.
>>
> 
> All those are perfectly valid uses of logical names. And one of the nice
> featurs as I see it, is that the applications doesn't have to "look up"
> the logical names, it just uses them, sicne the lookup is buiilt in in
> VMS runtime environment. If you have a configuration storage, such as
> some table in our database, you can just as well put "MBA1234:" there
> or (better) use a logical name. It doesn't matter for the application
> it can open both without having to lookup the logical name value first.
> 
> I do not know of any better way to handle that, and the integrated logical
> name lookup that VMS offers beats anything else I have seen.

Most tools are OK if they are used for what the were intended for.

Logicals for locations on disk are pretty sensible.

I do not see why symbolic links in the fil system should be better.

I like "relative to program" approach over logicals for simple
stuff, but that approach is not sufficient for anything complex.

Arne