Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!oakhill!oakhill-gateway!hamm From: hamm@austoto.sps.mot.com (Steve Hamm) Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer Subject: Re: Why use U* over VMS Message-ID: Date: 24 Oct 90 20:07:20 GMT References: <16438@shlump.nac.dec.com> Sender: news@oakhill.UUCP Reply-To: hamm@austoto.sps.mot.com (Steve Hamm) Organization: Motorola SPS, Austin, TX Lines: 66 In-reply-to: andyo@glasperl.masscomp's message of 23 Oct 90 14:14:16 GMT -----On 23 Oct 90 14:14:16 GMT, andyo@glasperl.masscomp (Andy Oram) said: Andy> It's been almost a week since Siegfried Heintze made his bold Andy> request. I'm gratified to see no one has flamed him, but really Andy> no one has made a strong answer either. The utilities and shell Andy> tricks and so forth are nice, but what about the design choices Andy> that make UNIX popular for systems and applications programming? Andy> This group is comp.unix.programmer, after all. Isn't there Andy> someone out there who can summarize the differences in working Andy> with the guts of VMX and UNIX, someone who can speak from the Andy> experience of porting highly interactive applications or writing Andy> device drivers or something like that? There must be some good Andy> general learning experiences here. I would speculate that there aren't that many people who have seriously used both VMS and UNIX. I have, at least somewhat seriously, although I don't consider myself expert on either one. I've used most of the system service calls under VMS, and done some strange terminal I/O stuff under BSD. More explicitly, I used VMS from versions 1.x to 4.x, from 1979 to 1986, and UNIX from 1986 to present. I bought VAXset, which was referred to earlier, when it first came out, and watched it develop. I develop simulation software, and do not do device drivers or kernel hacking. My views would undoubtedly be different if I did device drivers or internals. Frankly, other than the portability argument, I don't think that there's a lot of reason to switch from VMS to UNIX. (Other than getting out from under DEC's very expensive domain.) VAXset compares very favorably with the standard make/SCCS setup. VERY favorably: CMS has features in it that make it look OK compared to SCCS/RCS. MMS (comparable to make) is miserable and cryptic, but so is make. The code/variable navigation capability of (PCS? forget the name) isn't available under UNIX unless you buy some third party stuff. The VMS C compiler was nearly ANSI three or four years ago -- most other vendors haven't got their ANSI compilers out yet. And, as a command language environment, UNIX has a lot to hate: every command is its own little world, with its own syntax and, frequently, the same switch does something entirely different. VMS has commands that behave according to the same rules, with consistent syntax. There are some things that I used to do under VMS with a one line, relatively short command, that take a shell script with a find command to do under UNIX. Of course, you can do anything with a complex enough find command ;-) VMS, of course, has lots to get irritated about also, but I think a person in the know can match point-for-point with similarly irritating UNIX characteristics. I can get my job done, reasonably well, in either UNIX or VMS. Now I am using UNIX and wouldn't go back to VMS (well, if someone offered me LOTS of $$, perhaps). Why? DEC lost the workstation war (or at least the first round of battles), and my program runs on workstations. If I port to a DEC machine, it will have to be one running ULTRIX: VMS is an expensive, proprietary environment, and that means lots of work, time, and effort in porting for a limited audience. -- Steve Hamm ------- Motorola Inc. Semiconductor Systems Design Technology 3501 Ed Bluestein Blvd., MD-M2, Austin TX 78762 Ph: (512) 928-6612 Internet: hamm@austoto.sps.mot.com Fax:(512) 928-7662 UUCP: ...cs.utexas.edu!oakhill!austoto!hamm