Craig Berry wrote:
> As Peter has reminded me, VMS::Stdio::setdef() will do that for you and > VMS::Stdio is included in the Perl distribution. For serious DCL > replacement you may also want some of the extensions available on CPAN but > not included with Perl. VMS::Device, VMS::Process, VMS::System, and > VMS::IndexedFile come to mind immediately in no particular order, and of > course there are others. IMO Forrest Cahoon's VMS::Logical module should be on that list as well. That is, it should at least be on CPAN (it wasn't the last time I checked http://search.cpan.org/). > Where Perl can really slaughter DCL is not surprisingly in text processing. > If you have procedures that make heavy use of F$ELEMENT, F$LOCATE, or do > text substitutions and such then hundreds of lines of DCL can sometimes be > reduced to a handful of lines of Perl (sometimes even one line). Try doing floating point arithmetic in DCL someday* :-) Another aspect of the Perl vs. DCL is that it should prove easier in some programmer labor markets to hire perl programmers than it is to hire DCL programmers. All that said, I still like both languages and would hesitate in any shop to convert a working procedure from one language to the other just for the sake of saying "all of our stuff is written in _insert_favorite_language_here". Some DCL folks hate perl and cannot be made to switch. I would not try to sway them with any arguments along the lines of "Perl is better for ___" since they are already convinced that DCL is better. Peter Prymmer *For the masochists: this is allegedly possible using some string manipulation routines in DCL that emulate floating point operations in a symbolic manner similar to emulating floating point operations on an integer only machine such as a StrongARM. I've not had the "pleasure" of trying any such collection of floating-point-in-DCL proc libraries myself, but they are rumoured to exist out on the net somewhere.
