Why use U* over VMS

[Donald Lewine]

In article <1990Oct25.160937.28144 at edm.uucp>, geoff at edm.uucp (Geoff
Coleman) writes:
|> Well any O/S who's language of choice for opening and controlling
|> devices is FORTRAN (or BLISS) ala VMS has definite drawwbacks.

	This can also be considered a feature.  If you are a C programmer
	then it is obvious that UNIX is well matched to C.  On the other
	hand if you program in FORTRAN, BASIC, PASCAL, or ADA, then VMS
	does very well.  If you want to build a complex application in
	a combination of programming languages then VMS is quite good.

	I will admit the the VMS call-by-descriptor mechanism is poorly
	supported by VAX C.

|> The other obvious downfall
|> of VMS from my point of view was the need to worry about the
inifinite 
|> combination of file types (fixed length records, fixed block size)
versus the
|> UNIX philosophy of a file is a file is a file.

	Again, one man's bug is another's feature.  If I want to print 
	an ISAM file under VMS the print spooler will do it for me.  The
	fact that the system supports many record types means that the
	appplications programmer does not have to.

	A C program can read any format as stdin and VMS's Record 
	Management Service (RMS) converts it to new-line delimited
	strings.

	In UNIX it is not possible to support anything but flat ASCII
	files without special code in the application.  That is why
	most UNIX systems have only flat ASCII files.  This may be fine
	for software engineering but it is not what the Data Processing
	world wants.

These are only my humble opinions.  I have spent many years writing
applications for both VMS and UNIX.  I like them both but for 
different reasons.

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Donald A. Lewine                (508) 870-9008 Voice
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