[Info-vax] VSI roadmap

[terry-...@glaver.org]

On Friday, August 25, 2023 at 5:47:14 AM UTC-4, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2023-08-25 06:17, terry-... at glaver.org wrote: 
> > On Wednesday, August 23, 2023 at 10:47:38 AM UTC-4, David Jones wrote: 
> >> To support any number of Unix applications reading of files, the C runtime 
> >> includes fgets() to return what is logically a record. So what? 
> > 
> > That fails woefully even on some text file formats. I probably sound like I'm beating a dead horse, but go look at ckvfio.c for an idea of what is really needed to get text lines out of RMS regardless of the file format. For those who say "RMS contains all of the necessary info", go look at how True BASIC stores the source code for user-written programs (hint: RMS undefined).
> Well, to be fair - RMS undefined is hardly a "text file format". :-) 
> That's a very weird choice for any program to use for source code. 

I take it you've never encountered the religious fervor of latter-day 
Kemeny & Kurtz 8-}

VMS C-Kermit had to support every possible file format users would
throw at it (VMS was WAY more common back then) and convert it to 
either canonical ASCII or fixed-block binary. Frank da Cruz and I came 
up with the new "Labeled" file type, which containerized arbitrary data 
(in the VMS case, any and every possible RMS file type) for transport
with Kermit. The container could go through any system, including
ones with different character sets, and come out at the far end and be
reconstituted exactly. As I recall, the test was VAX -> DECsystem-20 ->
IBM VM/CMS -> MS-DOS -> VAX. There was also a standalone VMS
utility to reconstitute the file (for example, if it had been FTP'd back
to the VMS system).

There are all sorts of special cases, like Fortran carriage control, that
are converted by C-Kermit. My Kermit work was complicated enough
that it won me a DECUS award or two. 8-)