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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/19/2022 5:26 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> 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..

> 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.

Very few VMS users work at the DCL prompt today.

But I think a lot of VMS "users" are benefitting from
scripts running on VMS.

So good script capabilities does matter.

But I don't think huge updates to DCL is the way forward
for scripting.

Existing DCL needs to continue to work as it has for 10-20-30-40 years.

New stuff can be written in something else.

Arne