[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Bob Eager]

On Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:08:24 +0200, P. Sture wrote:

> In article <02d7462e$0$20630$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>,
>  Mark Daniel <mark.daniel at wasd.vsm.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> The whole null-termination approach is  a crock (much as I use it).
> 
> It was what made me gag (as in involuntary screams of NO!) most when
> reading the K&R book.  I was having quite enough problems with nulls in
> places they weren't supposed to be in COBOL programs at the time (mainly
> down to records not being initialized properly).  The last thing I
> wanted was a compiler that actually inserted and depended on the things.

I didn't like it much either. In those days I was doing a lot of BCPL 
programming; BCPL uses a length byte followed by the string. Occasionally 
it was a pain only having one byte to express a length.

The idea of null termination grew on me, but I'd rather use descriptors. 
My next machine was pretty well entirely descriptor based anyway!



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