Lacking Natural Simplicity

Well, it's my first program using SWTOOLS VOS this time around.

So, I finished by first program using SWTOOLS. It is a simple directory lister, called l, that interprets all its arguments as as file specifications to search for using normal RMS wildcards, or used *.* if not arguments are specified. It only returns the files with the highest version number, does not include the device, directory, or version number in the output, and converts the filenames to lower case. It should only be used to list files in the current directory. I needed it because I do things like

l *.sdcl *.for | sedit 's/{?+}$/ar uv src.ar $1'

and I don't want any version numbers to end up in the names of the archive members, and so on.

Rafor is much better than Fortran 77. And Fortran has even more footguns than C when it comes to using separately compiled functions and subroutines, with no notices that I'd passed things with the wrong type until I actually ran the program and got a register dump because of an access violation.

I was not able to include things from SYS$LIBRARY:FORSYSDEF.TLB using the Fortran INCLUDE statement in ratfor, since it has its own include keyword , so I separated that part of the program into its own Fortran source file. Because that file wasn't run through ratfor I couldn't use the standard macro definitions, like STDERR, so when I wanted to output the filesnames, I just wrote a ratfor subroutine that would print them and called that from the Fortran subroutine. A little clunky, but it worked.

Annoying, the fc command (which compiles *.f files to objects) doesn't work when run under mmk, so I had to write a command procedure dommk that does mmk/noact/out=tmp.com and @tmp.com to do the build. (I think this was somehow due to having multiple levels of subprocesses: mmk's and rc's.)

Anyway, the program ended up 48 lines of ratfor in three files and 84 lines of Fortran. The C program I started with was 170 lines (in one file), but doesn't work with the SWTOOLS shell's notions of I/O redirection.

Last edited: 2024-07-19 12:44:44 EDT