Re: Coding examples (Re: VMS Pascal article)

Stephen Hoffman formulated on Sunday :

On 2025-01-05 04:19:12 +0000, David Meyer said:
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Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> writes:
 

$ search sys$common:[syshlp.examples.pascal]*.pas varying
$ search sys$common:[syshlp.examples.pascal]*.pas "string("

 Wow! That directory and the others around it are a real treasure trove.

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While I haven't poked at the Pascal example code specifically (in the past couple of decades), unfortunately most of the other example source code examples included with OpenVMS itself also tended to be old, ill-maintained, insecure, and/or buggy.
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Various of the C code examples won't cleanly compile in recent decades, or uses older or outdated APIs.
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Decades ago, I tried to fix some of that mess, but other projects and other funding priorities interceded.
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I found answers to questions I had about calling RTL routines from Pascal.

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Pascal is the proverbial deep end of the OpenVMS calling standard and argument passing pool.
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Usual path for figuring out the more obscure parts of Pascal argument passing is the debugger, combined with the calling standard manual.
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Write some code to call Pascal to Pascal for whatever argument-passing you need, and use the debugger to reverse-engineer the descriptors used.
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Is there some introduction to VMS that collects links to resources like sys$common:[syshlp.examples] where VMS newbies can look to answer their own questions?

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Not that I've ever found. Most newbies don't do that. (And I write that as somebody that worked on the OpenVMS FAQ, a document which was posted here ~monthly in decades past.) You are, however, doing far better than many of the newbies over the decades, in that you're asking for these resources.
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https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v80/vmsfaq/vmsfaq.txt (with other formats available)
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https://web.archive.org/web/20061105000841/http://seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu/www/vms_beginners_faq.html
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I can assure you that any such FAQ will also routinely be ignored too, as will be the posting archives for this newsgroup, among other resources.
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Suggested reading from the OpenVMS manuals: the Users Guide manual, the Programming Concepts manuals, and then either or both the OpenVMS System Manager's Manuals and/or the OpenVMS Pascal docs.
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In ancient times, what used to be the DEC "TIMA/STARS" support database were also part of the usual path. Directly, or via llong-gone access paths including the old AskQ site. VSI has a support database with source code examples as well, but AFAIK they don't have that accessible for non-contract customers.
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There are source code postings in the archive of this comp.os.vms newsgroup. Google Groups has a fast search of that, but recent years of the Google newsgroup archives are filled with dreck and spam. There are other less-searchable options including https://www.usenetarchives.com
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https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/ (OpenVMS Freeware)
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https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/ (DECUS library)
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https://www.eight-cubed.com/examples.shtml (C examples)
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https://decuserve.org (resource info, "free shell" access to DCL on OpenVMS Alpha, decades of DEC Notes conferences)

There used to be a book from Digital Press named "programming OpenVMS
applications using Pascal" or something like that. Unavailable today
unless you manage to find a used copy, of course. But before its
publication, various versions of this book floated on the Digital
network. It was named "Pastools". I still have a hardcopy of that book,
version 0.9, so very close to the published version. Can electronic
versions of this book still be found somewhere ? It is a very valuable
resource for people who want to call system services from Pascal.
--
Marc Van Dyck