VMS: logicals UNIX: links, but...

[Paul Houtz]

chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:

>Now we begin to see the real problem.  You want customers to be able
>to take their 10 billion line Fortran or COBOL programs and run it on
>a Unix machine, without changing it.  (The chance that your customers'
>programs are written in C is vanishingly small, so I picked two more
>likely targets.)
>So:  Where in the F77 standard does it say that
	>OPEN (UNIT=6, FILE='FOO.BAR', DISP='NEW')
>*must* map to the Unix system call
>	fd = creat("foo.bar", 0666);
>
>  I submit that the problem is, not that the Unix system does not
>provide the means, but rather that your compilers do not take care of
>the task.  It is true that (e.g.) the 4.3BSD f77 compiler does not do

  Yes.  Now you are getting to the jist of the problem.  But you are 
now offloading the functionality I want in unix to the compiler.   

  Don't get me wrong.  That may be OK.   But on VMS if I have developed
a large application system and expected all the gl data files to be in 
the directory "gld" and all the executables to be in "gle"  and all the
parameters (startup, user customization, etc.) in "glp", I can simply
set up logicals for those files:  gle: disk1:gl/mysoft/executables,
gld: disk1:gl/mysoft/data, glp: disk1:gl/mysoft/parms.   By modifying 
the logicals file, the software is portable around the directory 
structure WITHOUT re-compiling.   Now, I won't really be able to port
that "portability" to unix.