ARPAVAX:mo (10/10/82)
Anticipating the questions, the following is a list (not garunteed to be exhaustive!) of sofware systems which "improve" (from a Unix user's viewpoint) the software development environment available on VMS. 1) Eunice The first Unix emulator, and very much oriented to 4.1BSD compatibility. Recent (favorable) review posted to this newsgroup. Available from the Wollongong Group. 2) Unity A Unix emulator originally oriented toward supplying the "vanilla" V7/32V environment, but now supporting System III. (Or will be very soon.) Many of the people doing Unity are from the great University of Toronto Unix tradition and seem to have done a very nice job doing a VERY difficult task. Available from Human Computing Resources in Toronto, Ontario. 3) The Software Tools The Tools provide a very Unix-like environment in a highly portable implementation. The project started with the famous Kernighan and Plauger book, but started borrowing from Unix when the boook stopped. Some of the Tools are in fact cleaner than their Unix counterparts (on the whole, the Tools are a bit more consistant, share more code explicity, have a more coherent library. This is a direct result of standing on the shoulders of the Unix developers and having the luxury of reimplementing in the light of retrospection.) Included in the Tools are editors, a mail system which is quite well done, many small filters, an SCCS-like tool, a text formatter, and many others. There is active development going on, producing things like a version of YACC, LEX, and some graphics tools. All the Tools are written in Ratfor, a processor for a C-inspired language (but not as complete as EFL) which generates ANS FORTRAN-66 as object code. The Tools accomplish all this by provide a "virtual operating system" implemented on top of the host operating system (no hacks to the local OS!!). The Tools have been implemented on about 50 different operating systems, for at least as many machines. The most important thing about the Tools is the portability of people: the Tools provide the same development environment across many different machines. These range in horsepower from Z80's to Cray 1's, and from CP/M to RSX-11 to CMS to VMS to Unix for operating systems (no partial ordering implied!). As for availability, the Tools implementations for RSX and VMS are available through the DECUS library for the two systems. Other versions are available from the different sites doing the port. Most versions are free, and those which aren't are quite modestly priced. There is a Software Tools Users Group with about 2000 members which will be meeting as part of the great UNICOM meeting in San Diego in January. 4) DEC Products DEC has some new software product of considerable interst. First and foremost is their C compiler. The compiler is certainly one of the better non-Bell-derived C compilers. The I/O library tends to be rather VMS oriented, but that is to be expected. This compiler goes a long way toward making C the implementation language of choice for "systems" programming on VMS (of course DEC still uses BLISS quite heavily internally). [Even so, Ratfor is still a hot contender, for portability sake!] DEC has announced some other tools including an SCCS-like widget called CMS (Code Management System), but I haven't seen it up close. I think the C compiler, CMS, and other odds and ends are components of something call VNIX, or so it was called on the blurb announcing it at Boston. See you local DEC salesperson for details. 5) Other Random Things There are a few other things I have heard about but don't know about the status. Walter Tichy at Purdue claims to be working on a VMS-native version of RCS, his Revision Control System. RCS is a given-to-the-world replacement for SCCS. I have been using RCS on Unix and it is a great improvement if for no other reason than being easy to use. James Gosling's Unix EMACS has been VMS-ized with the aid of the Eunice emulator, but you have to get EMACS from Gosling directly. I suspect there are other things out there I haven't heard about, and I suspect some people will object to reading this mail at all, but there are those people who have to do work outside the wonderful world of Unix, and they need all the help they can get. -Mike