Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!texbell!bigtex!milano!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!stodghil
From: stodghil@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Paul Stodghill)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Help with VAX Pascal
Summary: Not as bad as it could be
Keywords: pascal vms
Message-ID: <21670@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 88 03:06:52 GMT
References: <5900@june.cs.washington.edu> <5214@juniper.uucp> <1096@leah.Albany.Edu> <421@soleil.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: stodghil@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Paul Stodghill)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 29

In article <421@soleil.UUCP> geigel@soleil.UUCP (jogle) writes:
>In article <1096@leah.Albany.Edu>, bbw842@leah.Albany.Edu (Barry B Werger) writes:
>> 
>> Does anyone know how to receive a command-line parameter in VAX Pascal?
>
>   
>     Actually, this is a problem in VAX Pascal. We figured out a solution 
>     but it's certainly far from clean.  We use the VAX system routine
>     lib$get_foreign.  A sample piece of code using this might look like:
>
> [ Code and comments ]

I can think of two better ways to do it. Unfortunately, I can't give a
complete discription of each since I am no longer at a VMS site and no
longer have access to the manuals. Anyway, here are some pointers:

First, if the format of the command line is in more-or-less usual VMS style
(ie, parameters and qualifiers), try using the CLI$ routines described in 
the Utility Routines Manuals (all kinds of goodies here). These routines
are not that difficult to figure out and save you mucho time and effort.

Second, a routine called GETARGS (I think) appeared on one of the VMS
mailing lists last year. This routine provided a UNIX like semantic for
getting command line arguments. This is all that I remember. Sorry that
this is so vague.

						-- Paul Stodghill
						   stodghil@cs.cornell.edu
Paul Stodghill