[Info-vax] Local Versus Global Command Options

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/15/2025 2:22 PM, Mark Berryman wrote:
> On *nix, one's program can define any command syntax desired since the 
> command-line parsing is done entirely within the program.  The shell 
> doesn't really do anything except try to expand unquoted wildcards 
> (which somewhat limits the use of wildcards since the program cannot 
> differentiate between a source wildcard and a destination wildcard).  On 
> VMS, DCL can do it either way.  One can define a syntax that allows DCL 
> to do the parsing as Arne has shown, or one can tell DCL to simply pass 
> the command line to the program and let the program do all of the 
> parsing.  One advantage of the former is that if the command-line fails 
> to parse, the program never even has to be activated.

A VMS program has choices:
1A) SET COMM and CLI$
1B) SET COMM/OBJ, LIB$GET_FOREIGN and CLI$
2) LIB$GET_FOREIGN and custom parsing
3) Language specific way to get individual arguments

Arne