VMS C & records in files

[Steve Summit]

In article <2627 at ima.ima.isc.com> marc at ima.UUCP (Marc Evans) writes:
>I found that avoiding the RMS facilities is the most practical way of dealing
>with the VMS system.  What I did was wrote the CLIB functions that I needed
>using the QIO facilities.  This bypasses the RMS problem entirely...

People from a Unix background who try to use VMS have my
sympathies; and it is true that the low-level QIO interface,
though unwieldy, is functionally reminiscent of good ol' Unix
read/write/ioctl, but using it instead of RMS for disk file I/O
is generally a bad idea.  When DEC changes things, they change
RMS, and programs which (properly) use RMS don't notice the
change.  Programs with have gone the long, lonely road of wheel
reinvention (they essentially end up reimplementing parts of RMS,
and there's an awful lot of code there to reimplement) find the
road very lonely indeed when operating system upgrades which were
supposed to be transparent (new filesystems, network file access,
etc.) render the renegade programs non-functional.

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs at adam.pika.mit.edu