[Info-vax] Local Versus Global Command Options

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 12:02:37 -0700, Mark Berryman wrote:

> On 2/16/25 5:43 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Consider what happens: if you pass unquoted text to program X, DCL
>> converts it to uppercase, and I think also normalizes multiple spaces
>> to a single space. If you don’t want the text to be uppercased or
>> space- normalized, you put it in pairs of double quotes. But then these
>> double quotes also get passed as part of the command line. So the
>> receiving program has to do some non-trivial parsing just to get simple
>> literal text via the command line.
> 
> So, so, so very wrong.  You are *way* behind the times.
> 
> I *never* have to quote arguments when using programs that still use
> *nix syntax on VMS.  My arguments' case is never changed.

Prove it. It seems to me what you are claiming would break backward 
compatibility with the way VMS used to work.

> Here is the entry point to any C program on VMS:
> 
>   int main (int argc, char *argv[], char *envp[]);
> 
> See?  Argument passing works the same on VMS as it does on *nix, as
> described above.
> 
> Let's see, what's a good example?  Ah, here's one:
> 
> $ gs -q -P- -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sstdout=%stderr
> -sOutputFile=<something>.pdf <something>.ps
> 
> Again, see?  No quoting.  No case conversion.  Ghostscript sees the
> command exactly as I typed it and I typed it exactly as I would on a
> *nix system.

Can you show us a simple C program that just prints out its command 
arguments, and how it responds to some sample command lines?