VMS vs. UNIX s/w development tools - query

[Paul Houtz]

session at uncw.UUCP (Zack Sessions) writes:

>As far as grep and awk are concerned, grep is handled by the DCL Command
>SEARCH. And the functionality of awk, though in no way similar, can be
>done with the optional layered product, Datatrieve.

   Having used both systems, I can tell you that SEARCH does not even
  do part of what grep does.   Grep is a real tool, SEARCH is a simple
  string search utility.   In search's favor, however, is that it 
  traverses the directory tree, as does "find . -exec grep".

  Datatrieve is not like awk at all.  Datatrieve is a report writer for
  the VMS RMS files.   It does not have anywhere near the power of AWK.
  You can't really program in Datatrieve, but you can use it to generate
  reports.

   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 :-)). 

   The nice thing about the VMS debugger:  It is very robust (I never found
  a bug using it, I have found many using the unix debuggers), it displays
  data items using the format appropriate for the given language, etc.