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

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2022-01-19 kl. 19:49, skrev 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
> 
> 


My take is that VSI should focus on those things that really make
a difference for the *majority* uf the VMS users, and in particular
for the owners of the companies where these systems are used.

In our environment (and I guess that is valid for most current VMS
environments), out of the approx 200 "users" there are probably 3-4
that actually "use" DCL. So what group should we focus on?

How many of the end-users of system running VMS realy cares about DCL?

Why should we focus on things that such a minority of the VMS
users really "use" in their daily work?

I'd say that any additions to DCL that you can think of, does
nothing to the general acceptance of VMS as a platform.

If the shell is that important for a platforms success or failure,
Linux whould have been dead by now. A more user-unfriendly interface
is hard do find.