Well...  Yes, it is a true statement that DAP V5.6 is showing the list of months in upper case (pages 63 and 64), so no disagreement there.

On the other hand, nowhere in the specification do I find any mention of either an UPPER or lower case requirement for any character string and that is something I would have expected if it were an explicit requirement.  Historically the DEC systems that I used (OS-8, RSTS/E, RSX, VMS, Tops-%0, Etc.) were largely case insensitive and that was my expectation.  Being case sensitive is the kind of crock that I would expect Unix to do.

I think case insensitivity is winning, particularly when those cretins put the CAPS LOCK key where CONTROL rightfully belongs.  Bump into CAPS LOCK while you're typing a command on any of the above DEC systems and you can continue to type commands, no issues.  That is also true for IBM z/OS (nee MVS) and z/VM (nee VM), both of which I still use at work.  Unix shell?  Oh no, it has no clue...  Infuriating.

I don't believe I was able to test the failure against RSTS or and can't remember whether we checked against VMS, but it would be interesting to observe their behavior.  For a laugh, I might temporarily take the patch out to test VMS (again).

Truthfully, however, I thought it was just friendlier to give the RSX NFT client what it wanted.  And being case sensitive is more efficient and this is a PDP-11, blah, blah, blah, so what the heck?  We tried to be that kind of friendly where we could, back in the day.  On a good day, I mean...

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On 11/22/22 9:04 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

On Nov 22, 2022, at 12:18 AM, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/21/22 5:47 PM, John Forecast wrote:

I wanted to quickly find out how much, if  any, code was dependent on the OS type. One other area of incompatibility is that TOPS-10 and the Linux dndir require a DAP-level ACK after the attributes during directory listings.

Johnny and I did a lot of work and testing to get Tops-20 DAP/FAL to perform better.  Some were Tops-20, others not.  One Tops-20 bug was that an eight bit file would cause a directory listing to stop.  My favorite RSX issue was that it wants UPPERcase month names; I fixed that by UPPERcasing the result of ODTIM%.  I can't remember what Johnny did (if anything).

The DAP spec describes the month part of the date, and it shows specifically upper case strings.  So while one might argue RSX is too picky, sending mixed case month names is not allowed by the protocol spec.

	paul