Does Python help with the no-Unix handicap?

[Uwe Zessin]

In article <TQd15.356$i06.100607 at ptah.visi.com>,
  ge at nowhere.none (Grant Edwards) wrote:
> In article <20000612212452.P20700 at xs4all.nl>, Thomas Wouters wrote:
>
> >> >Is it's base structure less related to any one specific operating
> >> >system?
> >
> >> Perl isn't so much related to an OS, as it is to some other
> >> utilities (awk,sed,grep) and languages (bourne shell).
> >
> >Yeah, right, and a chair isn't geared as much to a human as to a one-
> >to-two meter tall, bi-legged creature with two arms, a flat back and
> >bends in all the right places ;)
> >
> >I guess it depends on your definition of OS, and of UNIX ;)
>
> Well, believe it or not, I actually did most of my initial
> awk/sed/grep shellscript learning under VMS.  (For God's sake,
> don't tell anybody...)
>
> DEC used to have a product called DECShell than consisted of
> the entire set of version 7 shell tools (including the Bourne
> shell, sed, awk, lex, yacc, and a libc that did a fair job of
> emulating the Unix system calls).
>
> Process creation under VMS involved a lot more overhead that
> undre Unix, so shellscripts ran a bit slower than DCL command
> scripts (DCL seemed to somehow run scripts without starting a
> lot of new processes)

Well, DCL is permanently mapped in the second GByte of the virtual
address space, while programms (like editors) run in the 1st GByte
and get removed on image-exit. Control is then returned to DCL.
I don't know shell programming very much, but DCL has many built-in
functions so you don't need to activate an extra program [F$SEARCH()
vs 'find'].
(I don't want to start a discussion if one feature is 'better' or
 not, OK? Let's agree that both systems are different.)

There is a POSIX environment with a real fork(), but that came _much_
later than DEC/Shell.


I have found that Python and OpenVMS live together very good. Don't
know how much you have done with system services, etc..., but if
you are interested, have a look:

http://www.decus.de/~zessin/python/doc/refman/vms_sys_getquiw.html
http://www.decus.de/~zessin/python/doc/refman/vms_sys_sndjbcw.html
http://www.decus.de/~zessin/python/doc/demo/rms_number_of_keys.html

--
Uwe Zessin


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