[Info-vax] Can DCL be enhanced to report why a qualifier is ambiguous ?

[Hans Bachner]

Chris Townley schrieb am 31.05.2021 um 16:51:
> On 31/05/2021 13:53, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2021-05-28, arca... at gmail.com <arcarlini at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Friday, 28 May 2021 at 20:06:14 UTC+1, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>
>>>> By extension, I should also point out I consider the 4-character thing
>>>> in DCL to be a terrible idea as well. :-)
>>>
>>>
>>> There was an early release not that pointed out that the 
>>> four-character thing specifically didn't apply to qualifiers that 
>>> started with NO, those needed 6 characters.
>>>
>>> I think the motivating example was MOUNT/NOUN[LOAD] which became 
>>> ambiguous when /UNIT appeared.
>>>
>>> I don't suppose 6 is  much better than 4 for you though :-)
>>>
>>
>> You assume correctly. :-)
>>
>> If you enter the extra characters, and they are wrong, then the command
>> should be outright rejected.
>>
>> Simon.
>>
> It was sometimes useful to add an incorrect character to avoid a symbol 
> definition - for example deletes

It still is useful. If you work at various customers' systems from time 
to time, with setups varying from customer to customer, it is convenient 
to type "$ direx /qual1 /qual2" to get displayed exactly the file 
attributes you want for the files you want to see.

I never found a customer system with "direx" defined as a symbol, and if 
it would be defined it wouldn't do much harm. On the other side, most 
customers have some dir* symbols defined, with and without abbreviaton.

Similar for other commands like copy etc.

Hans.