Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!santra!fuug.fi!pena From: pena@fuug.fi (Olli-Matti Penttinen) Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer Subject: Re: Why use U* over VMS Message-ID: Date: 1 Nov 90 15:48:30 GMT References: <1990Oct25.160937.28144@edm.uucp> <1089@dg.dg.com> <1990Oct31.141954.22736@druid.uucp> <3749@idunno.Princeton.EDU> Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system) Organization: Finnish UNIX Users Group, Finland Lines: 39 In-Reply-To: rhl@astro.Princeton.EDU's message of 1 Nov 90 03:14:03 GMT In article <3749@idunno.Princeton.EDU> rhl@astro.Princeton.EDU (Robert Lupton (the Good)) writes: >Before you all move over to VMS, happy in the knowledge that it supports >stream linefeed (unix-style) files, beware that the C rtl implementation >of read/write/open/close that works with them is glacially slow. Too slow >to be used (at least for the sort of image processing that I was doing). The best thing about RMS is it's ability to support DBMS's which generally run circles 'round a similar one under Ultrix/BSD. Besides, it's a little bit simpler to implement a database using a filesystem w/ built in ISAM instead of opening a Unix partition and seeking here and there. The worst thing is that (at least under VMS 4.x) you really had to know the exact file type of a *TEXT FILE* to be able to do anything usefull with it. For example: you could not fseek into the middle of a line (i.e. record) of a variable-lenght-record file, or whatchamacallit, which happens to be the default for all FORTRAN and EDIT output. You had to convert it to stream type before processing. One other point: when was the last you looked at the source of MicroEmacs? I'm not saying that it's optimally (or even sensibly) coded for each OS, but it sure strikes odd to find all that VMS only code in it. MicroEmacs 3.10: ibmpc.c: 11928 bytes os2.c: 11389 bytes unix.c: 14470 bytes vms.c: 32526 bytes Unfortunately (for VMS), there even are missing features ... ==pena -- Olli-Matti Penttinen Brainware Oy "When in doubt, use brute force." Tekniikantie 17 --Ken Thompson 02150 ESPOO, Finland Tel. +358 0 4375 320 Fax. +358 0 4553 117