From: arne@vajhoej.dk   
      
   On 12/6/2025 4:28 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:   
   > On 12/5/25 8:41 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:   
   >> What I see left is the "RATFOR approach" (in this century it should   
   >> probbaly be called "transpiling approach", but I suspect more people   
   >> here know about RATFOR than all the transpiling to JavaScript being   
   >> done today). Pre-processing extended DCL to old DCL.   
   >   
   >   
   > I don't see how transpilation could get you 64-bit integers, hashes,   
   > regular expressions integrated into the language, or other things that   
   > would be expected from a modern scripting language.   
      
   64 bit integers with external operations performance would be horrible.   
      
   I believe f$re_match and f$re_replace could work OK.   
      
   >                                                          Even if user-   
   > written lexicals were possible, you couldn't really use them to create   
   > or manage very interesting data structures given that DCL symbol values   
   > are limited to 1024 characters.   
      
   I believe it is 8192 today.   
      
   And unless the code is really quirky then I would assume going   
   to 32K would be easy.   
      
   > I don't think VSI is really big enough to invent and maintain an   
   > entirely new language. They should probably leave DCL as-is and start   
   > porting .NET and thus PowerShell.  As far as I know, all the relevant   
   > bits are open source and MIT license, and PowerShell is intended to work   
   > as both a CLI and a scripting language. It would be a big project, but   
   > probably smaller than creating a new DCL implementation.   
      
   .NET on VMS would be great.   
      
   Not just for PS but for a lot of stuff: C# language,   
   ASP.NET MVC + ASP.NET Web API etc..   
      
   It would also bring DBL to x86-64 as they support .NET   
   as platform.   
      
   All relevant parts of both PS and .NET should be MIT.   
      
   (Windows specific stuff are not relevant)   
      
   PS is *the* shell for Windows admins, but has it caught on   
   with Linux admins?   
      
   I would have thought those were mostly bash and Python.   
      
   BTW, I have never liked PS - it just doesn't appear logical   
   to me, but that is just my personal opinion.   
      
   And PS cmdlet's are like a combo of the existing DCL capability   
   to add verbs and the non-existing DCL capability for user defined   
   lexicals.   
      
   Arne   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)