[Info-vax] RMS - Wish list

[Hein RMS van den Heuvel]

On Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 1:26:37 AM UTC-4, tink... at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> PS sys$modify() got a pointer to some doco? Very useful. 

Not that I know. There are not many options.
As Brian indicates - RMEDEF is about all you need.

The only known usage in the system that I am aware of is in the linker/debugger image area.
The image itself in the exe file is 512 bytes fixed length - no length word, no round up.
The debugger symbol table is like an object file - variable length - inside the same image.
It's my understanding SYS$MODIFY is used to make the switch.

>> Another wish, get DCL to default to VAR not VFC files,

Yeah, not  big fan of VFC myself. supposedly they are a superset of of the all the RAT functionality.
I think it was mostly done to support COBOL constructs like 'AFTER ADVANCING x LINES' in a device independent fashion. Fortran also perhaps.
Anyway, I skip OPEN/WRITE and use CREATE/FDL="NL:" xxx.dat + OPEN/APPEN xxx xxx.dat
That way I can optionally control allocation, extent and the likes.
Examples:
 $ cre/fdl="record; form stream_lf" 
 $ cre/fdl="file; alloc 1234; record; form stream_lf" tmp.tmp
Btw... FDL as a string instead of file was one to fun things I decided to do while at RMS engineering back in the early 90's - (yikes, that's 30 years ago now!) - like it?

Hein