removing duplicate spaces from a string

[Richard Brodie]

"Ron Johnson" <ron.l.johnson at home.com> wrote in message
news:gWCb7.58757$oh1.22303973 at news2.rdc2.tx.home.com...

> How efficient is Python on VMS?

That's a tricky question. Starting up the interpreter is pretty much a
constant overhead, so for trivial tasks it's probably overkill.
For larger ones the advantage of precompiling to bytecode
(not to mention the expressivity of Python) tends to win out.

>  Also, how useful is it as a "super-DCL"?  Or does the lack of
> F$GETSYI, F$GETDVI, etc limit it's usefulness?

There are wrappers for the system services, so that's not a problem.
Long DCL scripts are frequently an abomination, and I tend to avoid
writing them if possible.

In the interests of balance, I should note that one has to be prepared
to hack on Python/VMS a little. The VMS port doesn't build out of the
box (thanks for the 2.1 port BTW, Uwe). The other P-language does
and is more widely used. Just a point to bear in mind.