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From: sasaki@HARVARD.HARVARD.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
Subject: VMS and programmer unfriendliness
Message-ID: <8607070334.AA17347@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Sun, 6-Jul-86 23:34:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8607070334.AA17347
Posted: Sun Jul  6 23:34:42 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Jul-86 17:40:30 EDT
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I'm not going to deny that VMS is rather arcane at times, but the
examples that are being given are ridiculous. Doesn't anyone know
about subroutines and functions? Whatever happened to program
libraries?

I don't know of any experienced programmer (on any system) who
doesn't have a bunch or routines that are callable to do things that
might be a little complicated to do directly. For instance, way back
in VMS version 1.5 I had a sleep function. Yes, it did use strange VMS
system calls that I had to look up in the manual to figure out how to
call, but after it was written, whenever I wanted to sleep 2 seconds,
then I just did a "sleep(2.0)" (I used a floating point number to be
able to use fractions of seconds).

I have routines to translate logical names, and to read a single
character (with and without echo), create character string descriptors
for C programs, do quad arithmetic, etc. When I need to do one of
these things, I just call one of these routines. If it becomes clear
that I need to have a program run faster, and removing the calls will
speed things up, then I use my subroutine library routines as examples
of how to call a system service, and I do it. No big deal.

VMS tries very hard to provide flexibility in the way a programmer can
do things. As an example, the Emacs text editor (any implementation)
will run a lot more efficiently on VMS if it took advantage of the
qiow more fully to read in N printable characters, but to return as
soon as it found a control character (normal characters insert,
control characters are usually commands). Instead, most
implementations read in a single character (no echo) then decide
whether the character should be echoed or not (echo it if it should be
echoed).

Is the tradeoff a reasonable one? Sometimes it is and sometimes it
isn't. I'm more than willing to take the time and effort to VMS make
an enviroment that I can program in.
----------------
  Marty Sasaki				uucp:   harvard!sasaki
  Harvard University Science Center	arpa:	sasaki@harvard.harvard.edu
  One Oxford Street			bitnet: sasaki@harvunxh
  Cambridge, MA 02138			phone:	617-495-1270