[Info-vax] VSI roadmap

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/21/2023 8:10 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2023-08-18, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> Just not anywhere as nice with RMS and "external to the database" record
>> definitions.
> 
> RMS was clearly designed by people who thought punched cards were cool...

Not sure what aspect of RMS that make you say that.

The existence of index-sequential file organization is a
common choice from IBM to FaceBook (see previous post). By
putting it in the OS with compiler support instead of
a language RTL or external library they made it very
easy to use same files from Cobol, Pascal and Basic. That is
pretty valuable for a multi-language environment like
VMS. And it is not oldfashioned in any way.

The existence of VAR, VFC, STM, STM_LF and STM_CR record
formats provided the ablity to actually provide info
about a files record format. Which at the conceptual
level is a good thing. It has become a bit problematic
in practice due to all the *nix software coming over
assuming STM_LF. But noone could foresee that back in
the late 70's.

Are there some details that could have been done
different and better? Absolutely! Having record
size limit of 2 GB (32 bit length) instead of
32 KB (16 bit length) would have been nice. If VAR
files has length both as line header and line trailer,
then such a file could easily be read backwards. I am
sure that if Hein could travel back in time he could
have optimized caching a lot. But wanting to change
some implementation details 45 years later is
no unique for RMS.

Arne