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Aucbvax.5897 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Thu Jan 21 17:15:53 1982 Let's get some things straight... >From CHAVEZ@HARV-10 Thu Jan 21 17:10:00 1982 As regards Terry Laskodi's message of 20 January, VAX/VMS DOES INDEED have several very nice facilities for the customized handling of terminal input; correct me all you VMS whizzes if I'm wrong, but it is possible (and indeed quite simple) to get the VMS terminal driver to let you do whatever you want with any character that comes along. Since VMS I/O is fundamentally asynchronous, it is possible to do several things (i.e. trap to a specified subroutine whenever ^E is typed) that, I believe, are not quite so easy to manage in Unix. For those who are less adventurous, there exist compromises in which you can let VMS do most of the work (echoing, rubouts, etc.) AND get rid of some potentially annoying things (like form-feed processing.) I am, moreover, convinced that VMS is much better for real-time processing -- I've seen some absolutely amazing interactive graphics (after the manner of video games like Centipede et al.) done on VMS. In short, I haven't seen a single operating system that offers more I/O flexibility than VMS -- and godly system privileges are NOT needed for most of the interesting applications (I managed to do some very amusing things with my highly restricted account on a VAX at the Air Force Weapons Lab.) Even so, I am equally convinced that DCL is a well-intentioned but misbegotten creature. DCL is powerful, to be sure, but the Shell is much nicer (from an abstract, CS point of view, admittedly.) However, DCL is not to be confused with VMS. If someone will only get around to writing a shell-like command interface for VMS (is this what's being done in the Eunice project?), I would be thrilled. The problem of making another command interpreter for VMS is not insurmountable; the standard login program keeps an entry for every user that specifies the command interpreter (usually DCL, sometimes MCR, but it can be ANY specially formatted file in SYS.) I would, of course, hope that the writers of Eunice will not insist on making VMS look EXACTLY like Unix; instead, I would urge them to consider refining the shell in the process. I reiterate my position that VMS's only major flaw is DCL; with a Unix-like interface and with VMS's better features (real-time scheduling, asynchronous posting of a variety of events, shared and map-on-demand memory pages, direct memory access for graphics/laboratory devices, inter-process communication, on-line installation of device drivers, and all that neat stuff), VMS would be an amazing operating system indeed. Such a system WOULD be the best of both worlds: powerful, clean in concept and design, efficient, fast, easy to use, flexible, and extensible. Comments and criticisms are welcomed. Regards, R.M. Chavez

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