[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Dave Froble]

On 10/11/2021 2:25 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.

RMS is implemented at a particular level, and is available to all 
languages.  No problem there.  The VMS languages use RMS to provide 
services, and the usage from the languages is nowhere what you're 
attempting to claim.  The RMS API also allows direct calls when a 
particular capability is not implemented in a language.  Perhaps 
something such as flush one or more I/O buffers to disk.

RMS is what it is, no more and no less.  Your attack on RMS just isn't 
called for.

Are there other methods for access to storage, yes,  and an app designed 
can select from the menu of available options.

While a bit aged, RMS still does what it always did.  If that works, 
then work it.

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

I would not be so sure of that statement.  If RMS is a good fit for a 
task, what's wrong with that?

When were you designed/implemented Simon?  Perhaps you're too old for 
this century?

> 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).

One can have both.  Any RDBMS systems I've seen have both.  I've got a 
database product (aged) that has both.

Perhaps one of the greatest things about data field definitions as part 
of the product is the ease with which general utility programs can be 
designed and implemented.


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David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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