[Info-vax] Local Versus Global Command Options

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2025-02-19 21:53:17 +0000, Dan Cross said:

> Be that as it may, the person you are responding to, and that you 
> regularly interact with at length, has shown repeatedly that he is not 
> acting in good faith.
> 
> Technical answers to technical questions, and even spirited debates 
> with vigorous disagreement, are all well and good as long as all 
> parties are at least attempting to honor a collegial spirit of 
> cooperation.  But in this case, as with most cases involving Lawrence, 
> the base conditions in which to have the discussion are simply not met.
> 
> This is the sort of thing that ought to be in an FAQ.

Is it feasible for DCL?  Sure. Though it'll likely involve passing some 
of the syntax to lib$table_parse or ilk for parsing, as do a few DCL 
commands I've encountered (or have written) over the years.  Or can go 
directly to lib$table_parse for the rest of the command, for that 
matter.

There've also been a few discussions about providing getopt_long()-like 
support with DCL parsing "underneath" the classic C parsing, and work 
to overhaul the DCL CLD APIs, but the results of that design and 
development effort never seemed compelling.

There are commands around that have four or more interfaces, too: 
getopt() or getopt_long() foreign command, SET COMMAND and DCL 
invocation, RUN with prompting, and callable API. Adding a DCL parsing 
loop inside the app is feasible, too. (There's at least one in OpenVMS 
itself with the first four.)

The whole area of command parsing, command options and syntax, saving 
and maintaining app-related preferences data storage and management, 
and related details within OpenVMS are all disjoint and ad-hoc at best, 
and as has been discussed before.

The size of the audience for DCL command syntax for FFmpeg is also 
approximately zero. A similar discussion and realization arose with the 
IP network diagnostic tool command syntax. The folks using those tools 
expected the syntax they expected, while very few sought  out the DCL 
syntax.

To Dan's point quoted above: Will the OP learn anything from this 
thread? Probably not. That seems about as likely as re-hosting OpenVMS 
onto the Linux kernel, as the OP had repeatedly proposed.



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