[Info-vax] Suggestion: Enhance DCL to support proper escape quoting.

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/19/2022 1:33 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> This suggestion follows the current discussion about using special
> characters as data, which shows just how horrible DCL is when it
> comes to using special characters as data in a command line.
> 
> How difficult would it be to alter DCL to add modern style quoting
> of reserved characters ?
> 
> In bash, escaping a special character is simple - you just add a
> backslash in front of the special character, so ' would become \'
> instead. I think that's vastly better and cleaner than how it is
> done in DCL.
> 
> What do you think ?

DCL is DCL and bash is bash.

Generally making \ an escape character in DCL will break some
existing code.

And I am not too keen on SET DCL/ESC=ENABLE.

Why not just say that those that need something more advanced than
DCL use just that.

They can get bash via GNV.

They can also use Python, Perl etc..

> On another unrelated question, does anyone here use brace expansion
> in bash and if so, how useful do you find it ? For example, typing:
> 
> 	simon{1,2}.txt
> 
> as a filename argument would create a command line which replaced the
> above with:
> 
> 	simon1.txt simon2.txt
> 
> Would anyone find that useful for DCL ? I find it _very_ useful in bash.

It would be tricky with DCL because DCL is different from the typical
*nix shell. The *nix shell does the globbing before activating the
program. DCL just pass on the argument to the program.

Arne