[Info-vax] Never Got Used To Those New-Fangled VMS Filename Extensions ...

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

When VMS first appeared, it made some changes to long-standing DEC 
filename extension conventions, not all of which I liked.

Assembly-language source files were .MAC on the various PDP-11 OSes (did 
this also apply to the PDP-10?), now suddenly they were .MAR. I always 
felt .MAC had a ring to it, you know?

On the PDP-11, there were two Fortran compilers, with source filename 
extensions .FOR (regular FORTRAN IV) and .FTN (optimizing FORTRAN IV+). 
The latter was snazzier; so guess which one DEC picked for its ultimate-
in-snazziness OS? Yup, the boring one.

COBOL used to be .CBL; now for some reason it became .COB. Did anybody 
ever create a program and call it CORN.COB?

BASIC was still .BAS. Pascal was always .PAS. Luckily nobody felt the urge 
to replace .TXT with .TEX or something ...

Compiler/assembler listing files became .LIS instead of .LST, again for no 
good reason I could fathom. Yet linker map files were still .MAP.

There was a new extension for executables, .EXE, which made sense, given 
all the changes in what programs could do (and, oddly, it was also used 
for shared libraries, instead of the older .LIB). But surprisingly, .OBJ 
and .OLB were unchanged. And I guess .COM made sense instead of the 
older .CMD, again because DCL was so far ahead of the older-style command 
interpreters.

(And of course Dave Cutler took .EXE along with other VMS-isms with him to 
Windows NT, but that’s another story.)

Directories still had to end with “.DIR;1”; I think this came straight 
from RSX-11.

Hey, after all, nostalgia is just another word for “it’s never too late to 
grizzle over what might have been” ...