Re: VAX/VMS

[Dieter Wilhelm <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de>]

"Juanma Barranquero" <lekktu@gmail.com> writes:

> On 11/23/06, Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> wrote:
>
>> VAX/VMS had a strongly typed file system

Could you briefly describe what a strongly typed file system is,
sorry?

Is this analogous to a "strongly typed" programming language?  Is in
this sense C a strongly typed language?  One must declare the type and
can interchange--with some exceptions--only same types.  Would Lisp be
a weakly typed language, because the type information is stored in the
data itself?

>
> This is a feature. As it was its automatic versioning of files.

I read Vista is going to have something similar.

>
>> It also had a really
>> obscure syntax for file names, using []:. among other special
>> characters.
>
> Obscure only from another system's mindset. There was nothing obscure
> in its filename syntax from my POV.
>
>> And a zillion different kind of hardwired interacting
>> privileges that meant that ordinary users rarely were able to do what
>> they want, but hackers could do anything as there were always some
>> obscure path from "may use the printer privilege" to "can overwrite
>> system files privilege".
>
> As if that didn't ever happen on Unix, did it? :-)
>
>> The editors were EDT and later TPU.  They were much better than vi, I
>> have to give them that.  You can suffer them in Emacs with M-x
>> edt-emulation-on <ref> or M-x tpu-edt <ret>. (TPU was really a system
>> for writing editors in).

I really like Emacs but I think vi(m) is not so bad, after all.

>
> The usual TPU editor was called EVE (Extensible Vax Editor).
>
>> Some people liked VAX/VMS, typically the same who preferred Wirth
>> Pascal over K&R C.  For the rest of us, Ultrix was a much more
>> productive environment, once you had installed Emacs in it.
>
> Thought I'm no Pascal freak, about the only language I wouldn't prefer
> over K&R C is BASIC...
>

For what it's worth, both of you can go on indefinitely, I like to
read about these things 8-)

>                    /L/e/k/t/u

-- 
    Best wishes

    H. Dieter Wilhelm
    Darmstadt, Germany