25 Dec
2019
25 Dec
'19
11:44 p.m.
VMS testing is largely complete and resulted in a number of tweaks.?
This was particularly the case for logging as VMS appeared to be more
productized in this area. ? I picked up a number of good ideas, most of
which I've implemented.? I also had a rather glaring omission; I had
completely forgotten to implement restrictions on PRINT...? There was
also a problem of properly reporting error codes; in some cases, a
wildcard request could come back from the 20 with no indication
whatsoever that all the candidate files were rejected due to lexical
restrictions.? The workaround gives a result, but apparently imperfectly
(see below).
RSX testing has been quite interesting.? It seems that the 20 doesn't
appear have _ever_ reported month formats properly. The DAP 5.6
specification appears to be neutral in certain areas as to case
sensitivity.? Most importantly, the case of a month is not made
explicit, although the abbreviations are uppercase.? The 20 uses a
monitor call (ODTIM%) to convert from the 36 bit internal format to
text, yielding capitalized months.? So, instead of *DEC* for a month,
you get *Dec*. RSX is sensitive to this and reports all dates and times
as zero. It was an easy fix to uppercase everything.? Kudos to Johnny
for an amazing guess in that area.
Of more concern is the fact that certain results from the 20 can cause
the RSX DAP client (NFT) to go into an Infinite Loop, necessitating an
abort!? This is suspected to be incorrect error reporting on the 20's
side.? So I've got some digging to do in that area.? I'll get to that in
a few days; I had a few more access restrictions that I wanted to
implement to give additional granularity.
I'm hopeful for some RSTS results in the not too distant future.