FreeTDS Development Group

["Jackson, Craig" <Craig.Jackson AT cengage.com>]

Craig A. Berry replied to JKL:
> > Larry Wall mentioned a similar artifact once in writing about Perl 6.
> > He remembered IIRC a setting in VMS mumble something like SET EXTENDED
> > ON to make it DTRT.  He observed that thereafter *every* script needed
> > that boilerplate in its preamble.  One gets the sense Larry is not a fan
> > of boilerplate or, for that matter, preambles.  
>
> I'd be curious what the VMS boilerplate was as I can't think of anything 
> like that, though the details are not relevant to your
> point.  In the Perl 5 world, a great many bits have been shed in arguments 
> over whether people should continue having to write "use
> strict;" at the top of their Perl programs or whether some future version 
> of the language will have that built in, breaking lots of
> existing code in the process.  Balancing forward progress and compatibility 
> is never easy, as is somewhat humorously discussed today
> at <http://raganwald.posterous.com/javas-comb-over>.  

It sounded to me like he was talking about SET PROCESS/PARSE_STYLE=EXTENDED. 
(Writing it out completely for clarity.) However, I doubt that most VMS hands 
routinely put that at the top of their scripts.

Craig Jackson