CONS on OpenVMS

[Don's Email]

Ever since reading the Spring 1998 Perl Journal article about CONS by Bob Sidebotham, I've had it in the back of my mind to test the package in my OpenVMS environment.  OpenVMS has a make equivalent called MMS, however in most cases you can't simply download a Unix make file and use MMS.  Therefore, I'm not particularly attached to make in the first place.

 

OpenVMS compiling and linking works differently than its Unix counter parts.  Several key issues cause me to wonder if CONS will work in my environment.

 

1) The compiler and linker are called separately in OpenVMS.

    Unix: 

gcc -c hello.c -o hello.o

    OpenVMS:

cc hello.c

link hello.obj

 

2) The object and executable files have different extensions

hello.obj and hello.exe

 

3) Library commands are different

Unix:

ar r libworld.a world.o

OpenVMS:

library/replace/object libworld.olb world.obj

 

4) Perl is called using the "Perl" command

Unix:

cons.pl hello

OpenVMS:

perl cons.pl hello

 

In addition, I've receive an error assigning to the $ENV variable on this platform and the file naming conventions differ.  The $ in  DCL files can cause problems.

 

Basically, I'm wonder if anyone has successfully used the CONS package on OpenVMS.  Or if anyone has an opinion on how surmountable these issues will be in the OpenVMS environment.

 

Sincerely,

Donald G Plugge