[Info-vax] A DCL wish list of sorts...
Stephen Hoffman
seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid
Wed Mar 20 12:46:20 EDT 2019
On 2019-03-20 13:43:02 +0000, pcanagnostopoulos at gmail.com said:
> Note the WRITE takes a list of expressions, so you can define a couple
> of symbols for apostrophe and double quote and then use them in the
> WRITE to make it more scrutable.
There's no shortage of inscrutable DCL code around. I've written some
of it, too. As for related enscrutification, I've commonly updated DCL
source code to replace the embedded control sequences, with a similar
substitution. For example, esc = 27, bel = 7, sq = 39, dq = 34, ng =
U^1F196, ok = U^1f197, etc. This replacement to make the DCL source
code less bold and less blinky when displaying it. And yes, this
scheme also works with single and double quotes.
There are other related areas that have been longstanding messes, too.
No menuing support in DCL, for instance. DCL is a hassle to use for
this, and for many of the tasks it's still used for. Just bumped into
a dumb menuing bug in VMSLICENSE (though easily worked around) too, and
there are other bugs and other hassles waiting around. Because there's
no better alternative baked in. I'd probably first script a
command-line menu with Python or some other choice, were that included.
But DCL and the command line in general are not where the world is
building most user interfaces. Even for system managers and server
management, and related tasks.
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