[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-10-09, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> On 10/9/2021 4:55 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>
>> And here I was trying to explicitly not slag on RMS and its
>> capabilities, as that'd solely serve provoke a torrent of folks quite
>> reasonably pointing out that RMS is perfect for {app}.
>>

Actually to those people I would say that RMS is pretty much perfect - for
applications written in Macro-32 that require record-level access.

The RMS APIs perfectly match the huge level of work required in writing
a full application in Macro-32 (that would be far easily written in a
higher-level language) and perfectly matches Macro-32's utter inability
to provide any meaningful abstraction layers in Macro-32 source code
when compared to abstractions available in those same higher-level languages.

The RMS APIs are what you would have designed in the 1970s. They are not
what you would design in this century.

>
> Which it is, for those apps that need and use it's capabilities.  Well, 
> maybe not "perfect".  There is that lack of definition of data fields 
> that is so lacking in RMS.  What I believe you call "marshaling".
>

I would not describe this as marshalling, as marshalling is the conversion
of data from one format to another.

In this case, you would want the fields to be directly accessible
from source code via a field-level API instead of a record-level API
(as RMS is).

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.