[Info-vax] Very simple DCL question

[cao...@pitbulluk.org]

On Thursday, January 5, 2023 at 1:51:06 AM UTC, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/3/2023 6:28 AM, cao... at pitbulluk.org wrote: 
> > On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 4:45:45 PM UTC, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
> >> $ type z.com 
> >> $ write sys$output "''p1'" 
> >> $ @z a 
> >> A 
> >> $ @z "a" 
> >> a 
> >> 
> >> This is not really surprising. 
> >> 
> >> But are there any way to preserve pn case without 
> >> double-quoting it? 
> >> 
> >> Like this hypothetical syntax: 
> >> 
> >> $ set proc/parse=(extended,pnkeepcase) 
> >
> > Taking z.com, for really simple single-parameter stuff, we used to: 
> > 
> > $ z == "@z """ (that's three double-quotes at the end) 
> > then 
> > $ z fff aaa bbb 
> > fff aaa bbb
> That is pretty clever. 
> 
> But I do get an extra space first in the value and 
> everything go in P1 despite any spaces. 
> 
> Arne

Yeah, it's not perfect. We had a TELL command with the syntax TELL <userID> <message> to allow ordinary users to broadcast a one-liner to the specified user. It was done using a server which could handle the server-to-server details when the userID included a DECnet node name. For a conversation, most users would define a symbol, like z to preserve the case of the message when in heated one-liners with others, otherwise you would have to:
$ tell bloggs "Stop hogging the CPU!"

K