VMS vs. UNIX s/w development tools - query

[Darin Johnson]

In article <1081 at vsi.COM> friedl at vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:
>In article <810033 at hpsemc.HP.COM>, gph at hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) writes:
>> 
>>    VMS has debuggers that make the Unix debuggers look like the jokes that
>>   they are.  The VMS debugger has a common command interface for C, Fortran,
>>   Cobol, and Pascal.  I have not used it with Basic, but I bet it works on
>>   that language as well (compiled basic is a Big Deal on VMS--many, many
>>   applications are written in it, so don't laugh :-)). 

Hmmn.  Except for using a full screen display, I don't think too much of
the VMS debugger.  Dbx mode inside Emacs, or dbxtool, do a lot more for
me (so I can't see the assembler, but so what?).  The VMS debugger will
not work correctly with C, even in version 5.0 (only certain types of
strings can be printed out, and even then, you usually have to precede
them with a '.').  Then you have complex commands (you can alias them
or assign them to keys though, if you figure out how), different types
of variables have different commands to print them (at least in C),
you can't re-run a program without leaving the debugger, etc.  A nice
feature though, is command recall, but that is a feature of VMS, not
the debugger.

I'm sure someone will come out with an X-based debugger that really
shines (separate windows for separate call frames, assembler window, etc
- eg: more than dbxtool or xgdb).

Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin at pyramid.pyramid.com)
	Can you "Spot the Looney"?