[Info-vax] VSI roadmap

[Dave Froble]

On 8/22/2023 8:05 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

Some times you just drive me batty ....

What good would be a 2 GB record, when contemporary disk drives might be 100 MB, 
or less?

> 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.

Change hell, just implement what's needed.  In 5-10 years, it will all be 
obsolete anyway.


-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc.      E-Mail: davef at tsoft-inc.com
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