From VMS to UNIX

[Philip Lantz]

I just had to respond to Dan Klein's article about VMS and UNIX.  While
he made some very good points and I agree with most of what he said,
there are a couple things I just have to argue with.

	"The Unix set of primitives is ... pretty redundant. (i.e.
	read, fread, getc, getchar, cgetc, fgetc...).  Give me *one*
	primitive to do stream input.  You can create macros to get
	all the syntactic sugar you like...."

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???  UNIX has *exactly one* primitive to ANY kind
of input: read().  All the others you mentioned ARE JUST THE SYNTACTIC SUGAR.
They are contained in the library, are user code, and need not be used, if
the programmer does not so desire.

In contrast, how many OS entry points are there to VMS to do input?  (I
honestly don't know, but I'll bet there are more than one!)

I agree with his points about the user interface and the documentation.
I very much like the UNIX interface, because I do know what I'm doing.
But what he doesn't mention about it is that it can be changed at will.
You're not stuck with the shell.  On VMS, if you don't like DCL (or
whatever that other one is)  you're out of luck.  On UNIX, I can modify
the shell to suit me, use that one, and not bother anyone else on the
system.

Philip Lantz
textronix!bronze!philipl