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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/20/2022 10:25 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 1/20/22 9:19 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 1/19/2022 9:37 PM, Chris Townley wrote:
>>> On 20/01/2022 02:14, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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
>>
>> *nix or general - bash and tools are obvious *nix 
> 
> bash is Linux, not Unix.

Bash was developed on Unix (first version of bash came out
2 years before the first version of Linux). It became
popular on Linux and was later adopted by various Unixes.

I think *nix is a good term to describe it.

>                           Yet another case of NIH because there
> were already shells available with all the features and abilities
> of bash.

People seems to prefer bash over the other available shells.

> 
>>                                                     but Perl
>> and Python are not *nix specific.
> 
> Both were originally developed in the Unix environment.  Use in any
> other environment is an afterthought.

They were developed on Unix but I don't think calling usage on
other platforms an afterthought is proper description.

When Guido Rossum released the first public version of Python he wrote:

<quote>
It runs on most modern versions of UNIX, on the Mac, and
I wouldn't be surprised if it ran on MS-DOS unchanged.  I developed it
mostly on an SGI IRIS workstation (using IRIX 3.1 and 3.2) and on the
Mac, but have tested it also on SunOS (4.1) and BSD 4.3 (tahoe).
</quote>

so he did test on Mac from day 1 (and Mac at that time was not *nix).

When Larry Wall released the first public version of Perl the build
configuration included:

<quote>
/* EUNICE:
  *	This symbol, if defined, indicates that the program is being compiled
  *	under the EUNICE package under VMS.  The program will need to handle
  *	things like files that don't go away the first time you unlink them,
  *	due to version numbering.  It will also need to compensate for lack
  *	of a respectable link() command.
  */
/* VMS:
  *	This symbol, if defined, indicates that the program is running under
  *	VMS.  It is currently only set in conjunction with the EUNICE symbol.
  */
</quote>

so definitely Unix centric but VMS aware.

>> DCL is a good interactive command language and not as good
>> a scripting language.
>>
>> If DEC 35 years ago had decided to enhance DCL to make
>> it a great scripting language then it would have made sense:
>> - DEC had money
>> - bash/Perl/Python did not exist yet
> 
> Maybe not bash, but other shells which were ideal for both
> interactive use and scripting were.

sh, csh, ksh etc. was around.

But no more ideal than very few use them today.

Arne