On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 17:00:49 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie declaimed the following:
VMS was much better documented. Something like three/four feet of 3" thick 3-ring binders. Think there were two or three binders just for the SYS$ system calls, another for RMS$ (record management services). Manuals for each compiler...
Try finding that stuff for M$ -- it's a pain, often scattered about. ("Programming Windows 6th Ed" focused on Win8 "Apps" using C#; the "Windows Internals" books describe how the OS works, but don't really provide anything on the Win32 system calls themselves).
I don't recall those... At least I could make sense of the compiler options since compile and link were separate (and, in practice, we would stuff object files into a library so the link statement basically referenced just the main function and the library as a whole)... Unlike the common invocation of "gcc" which attempts to do everything via one command invocation.
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Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/
They were basically surprisingly large programs, each with a sort of mini- shell worked interactively. This tended to be quite noticeable - and could be hard to work round in command scripts, though probably not a big issue if they were being used interactively. IIRC there was one for file management. I thought this was odd, the more so as every other OS I'd used up to then (Georges 1,2 and 3, Flex, DOS, UniFlex and VOS) had a recognisably separate command line interpreter and a whole bunch of separate commands, though not always as clearly separated out as they are in Unix/Linux.
Almost every compilation system I've used has split out compiling and linking as separate operations and some have separated the preprocessor from the compiler. The PLAN assembler (ICL 1900) had a preprocessor with a syntactically different language which was powerful enough to let you define your own special purpose languages - rather like using yacc+lex as a front end for C, Coco/R as a front-end for Java or the IDMS database preprocessor as front-end for COBOL.
OTOH I've never needed to separate the C preprocessor from its compiler phase since its so much an integral part of C. WQhen you come to languages like Algol 68 the whole thing is so self-referential that everything is rolled into a single compilation executable with no real distinction made between the code you're working on and the standard prelude and project-defined modes, operators and functions which together define the compilation environment.
On top of that, a lot of languages / compilation systems have an equivalent of C's 'make' - there are two for Java (ant and maven) - and IMO anyway, are nearly essential for developing any program thats big enough that splitting it into a set of source files simpifies its development.
Please don't lets get onto IDEs: I like make and ant a lot but am not particularly fond of IDEs - I've used the Borland C IDE and IntelliJ for Java fairly intensively and decided I'm a lot happier using my favourite editor plus, depending on the language being written, using its equivalent of 'make' to manage the compilation process.
On Sun, 11 Aug 2019 17:37:05 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie declaimed the following:
Never needed anything more than copy/rename/delete/purge and set attributes/protection.
There may have been something specific to creating ISAM files with defined record structures from the command line. (Ah, yes -- "Writing Real Programs in DCL" states that one needs to use "File Definition Language Facility" to specify the attributes of indexed files; never needed it myself as the FORTRAN 77 OPEN statement accepted enough keyword arguments to define indexed files within that language).
Oh, we did have MMS (tightly coupled to CMS which was the code versioning package). MMS was not language specific -- especially since once one got to the object file, libraries and linking were the same for all. And since all DEC languages shared calling conventions (well -- with use of overrides: %val(arg) to pass the value of a variable rather than the default FORTRAN address reference, similar for Pascal...) having a mixed environment application was feasible.
--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/
I found a really good one some years back, very flexible with a wide choice of editors, version control etc. and support for pretty much every language around. They called it unix.
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