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

[Chris Townley]

On 20/01/2022 02:14, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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


It is not as if it is difficult to install various 'nix utilities. I 
have quite a few, although I probably only use a a few of them - grep 
being one of them

Chris


-- 
Chris