[Info-vax] Decforms shareable executable forms.

[Richard Maher]

On 1/04/2020 5:49 am, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
> On 3/31/2020 4:37 PM, Hein RMS van den Heuvel wrote:
>> On Friday, March 27, 2020 at 11:18:02 PM UTC-4, Richard Maher
>> wrote:
>>> On 26/03/2020 7:39 pm, Thierry Courtoy wrote:
>>>> I intend to use Decforms
>>> 
>>> You sad Muppet :-(
>> 
>> LOL!
>> 
>> Greetings Richard.
> 
> For those keeping score on the DECforms front, it was discovered that
> the demo program distributed with DECforms was not complete.
> 
> The next VSI version of DECforms will have a corrected demo program.
> 
> Our support specialist said . . .
> 
> Deeply buried in the DECforms programmers reference page (and this
> information doesn’t appear anywhere in the Developer’s Guide and it
> should) we have the following:
> 
> ============================================= form-specification 
> OpenVMS usage: char_string type: character-coded text string access:
> read only mechanism: by descriptor
> 
> Optional argument that specifies the name of the form in the IFDL
> source file. The Form Manager first looks for a .form file, then
> searches for a file-specification. If you do not specify this
> argument, you must specify file-specification. If the form specified
> in file-specification is a .form file, form-specification is ignored.
> If your form is linked into a shareable image, you must specify this
> argument and the file-specification
> 
> =============================================
> 
> I think when the examples were put together, the .form files were
> left in the directory which meant the examples were able read the
> .form and gave the false impression that the shareable was being
> used.
> 

It's not what "VSI" are doing with DECforms, it's the fact that it was 
conceived at all :-(