[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[P. Sture]

In article <7ij0ueF30a3ujU4 at mid.individual.net>,
 Bob Eager <rde42 at spamcop.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:17:31 +0200, P. Sture wrote:
> 
> > In article <7if6l2F30a3ujU2 at mid.individual.net>,
> >  Bob Eager <rde42 at spamcop.net> wrote:
> > 
> >> By 'quality', I meant well written, i.e. properly laid out, commented,
> >> maintainable. It works OK!
> > 
> > The thing that raised warning signals with me once I saw the NT APIs was
> > the dependence on null terminated strings.  I'd spent a lot of time in
> > VMS applications eradicating those by adding a length parameter or using
> > descriptors.
> > 
> > And when CPU was the limiting factor, I didn't see the point of scanning
> > a string parameter to find the terminating null when the calling routine
> > knew the length of the string in the first place.
> 
> I think that's inevitable when the major language in use is C. That's a 
> design issue; I was thinking more of how well the code was (not) written.

>From time to time folks have written here about defensive programming in 
C to avoid that (I don't remember the details).

Some of the coding examples I found on the web in the early NT 4 era 
seemed alarmingly short on error return checking to my eyes, but I don't 
know how well those examples represented what the NT code itself was 
like.

-- 
Paul Sture