[Info-vax] C99 updates to CRTL

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-07-30 21:52:46 +0000, Dave Froble said:

> On 7/30/2019 11:56 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
>> Logical name cruft builds up, too.  It can be scattered all over the 
>> app source code, and all over the app documentation, and often ends up 
>> scattered around user startup procedures, too.  And different systems 
>> near-inevitably drift apart. Different logical names, different modes, 
>> different settings.
> 
> I'll just say this about app data.  It belongs to the app, nothing else 
> needs to apply for anything to do with such data.

Interesting.  Y'all like RMS though, right?  Because RMS allows you to 
use different apps to access the same (RMS-based) database files.  That 
makes RMS and its interpretation of the file formats... common.

RMS is stuck about thirty years back in terms of higher-level access, 
and access via Datatrieve never caught on.  That largely because 
Datatrieve was an add-on and never integrated into OpenVMS, and which 
had the expected results for ongoing Datatrieve usage.  And AFAIK, 
there was never a callable Datatrieve.  Datatrieve here being an 
example of an API into RMS files.  Which is to RMS files what some 
callable interface and a command interface into a configuration file 
would provide.

Data can be private to an app, certainly.  Often is.  As can RMS file 
data.  Or some of the data can be considered shared and/or 
user-configurable, and some can be private.  As can RMS file data.

But I don't see a whole lot of reason—and here again following the 
precedent of RMS—to make the configuration-management APIs and routines 
private.  Nor to hack this data store using logical names for 
configuration data.

Logical names are a very limited key-value mechanism, and would be 
laughed out of any design discussions around configuration data storage 
on OpenVMS.  Were logical names one of the very few ways to do this on 
OpenVMS, short of rolling your own configuration tools and your own 
parser.

Now each of you here that thinks "there can be no better way than 
logical names", well, you haven't given it much thought to this whole 
environment now, have you?  What you have works, so you'll use it.  It 
is it what you really want?  Logical names are stuck in a design from 
the mid 1980s and rooted in an even earlier RSX-11-era implementation.  
Hopefully we all have learned a few things around design and 
development and app isolation since then, too.  OpenVMS is not ever 
going to be competing in the 1980s again.  It's going to be competing 
in the 2020s.  And our app code either moves forward, or we eventually 
admit that to ourselves and make plans to retire it.






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