[Info-vax] Use of logical names other than I/O redirection

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/11/2022 11:55 AM, Marc Van Dyck wrote:
> It happens that alanfe... at gmail.com formulated :
>> Greetings.
>> I recall Hoff once lamenting about logical names. He said they are 
>> mostly good for I/O redirection. And, IIRC, not liking using them to 
>> store application data.
>>
>> I was wondering how people here (esp. Hoff!) feel about their use in 
>> batch queues and mail.
>>
>> Just askin'. 
> 
> I consider logical names to be the equivalent of the windows registry.
> Anything I need to store and that doesn't warrant a file is fair game.

(cut out some usage that I agree with)

>                                 If read by 3GL code, it can even be
> non printable ascii or binary, like VMS itself does it with licenses
> in LMF$LICENSE_TABLE. I consider that much more convenient than
> configuration or .INI files.

I see a few problems with that:
1) Logical names are not automatically persisted. They rely on
    being defined at startup. Of course necessary logicals should
    be set in the startup procedures, but we all know that
    "should" is not 100% reliable.
2) The connection between application and logical names is
    not always easy to make. It is way easier to connect a
    config file in the app directory with that app.
3) Logical names does not scale well. 50 fine, 100 fine,
    200 fine but 100000 does not work. Windows registry is
    a fine example of something that has become so big that
    it is difficult to find things.

MS has also concluded that. Various old technologies including
COM used registry extensively, but .NET use config files
in app directory (either XML or JSON depending on .NET
version).

Arne