On Sun, 11 Aug 2019 17:37:05 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie
 declaimed the following:


>They were basically surprisingly large programs, each with a sort of mini-
>shell worked interactively. This tended to be quite noticeable - and
>could be hard to work round in command scripts, though probably not a big
>issue if they were being used interactively. IIRC there was one for file
>management. I thought this was odd, the more so as every other OS I'd
>used up to then (Georges 1,2 and 3, Flex, DOS, UniFlex and VOS) had a
>recognisably separate command line interpreter and a whole bunch of
>separate commands, though not always as clearly separated out as they are
>in Unix/Linux.
>

 Never needed anything more than copy/rename/delete/purge and set
attributes/protection.

 There may have been something specific to creating ISAM files with
defined record structures from the command line. (Ah, yes -- "Writing Real
Programs in DCL" states that one needs to use "File Definition Language
Facility" to specify the attributes of indexed files; never needed it
myself as the FORTRAN 77 OPEN statement accepted enough keyword arguments
to define indexed files within that language).



>On top of that, a lot of languages / compilation systems have an
>equivalent of C's 'make' - there are two for Java (ant and maven) - and
>IMO anyway, are nearly essential for developing any program thats big
>enough that splitting it into a set of source files simpifies its
>development.
>

 Oh, we did have MMS (tightly coupled to CMS which was the code
versioning package). MMS was not language specific -- especially since once
one got to the object file, libraries and linking were the same for all.
And since all DEC languages shared calling conventions (well -- with use of
overrides: %val(arg) to pass the value of a variable rather than the
default FORTRAN address reference, similar for Pascal...) having a mixed
environment application was feasible.



--
 Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
 wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05