Article 172093 of comp.os.vms: In article <5o34ms$fsl$1@lurch.mcc.ac.uk>, helbig@multivac.jb.man.ac.uk (Phillip Helbig) writes: >I don't have much experience in C/C++ development, so here are some >naive questions: > >Does lint exist for VMS (7.1 Alpha)? Where can I get it? Is it >necessary, or is it possible achieve the same functionality with some >combination of compiler switches. The DEC C compiler in its strictest mode should be more than good enough. See if you can get your code to compile cleanly with: $ cc/standard=ansi89/prefix=all/warn=(enable=all) >What about C++? That language is the devil's own. C++ is the least portable language I have had the misfortune of encountering. Apparently there is a lot of slop in the standard, or the standard is changing too fast, or maybe the compiler writers ignore the standard - in any case, the odds are <10% that you can build any C++ program from another platform successfully on OpenVMS (at least, that's what my success rate has been.) If it is a gnu C++ program, well, we're talking really long odds. Your best bet is that if you happen to run into a nongraphical VC++ program - then use /standard=ms and you might have a shot at it. (There aren't too many nongraphical VC++ programs though!) You better hope that if it does compile it runs out of the box, because debugging C++ on OpenVMS is perfectly dreadful - the debugger sees everything in terms of functions and globals/locals, but C++ is written in methods and objects - you will have fun (NOT!) figuring out which of the zillion different function/data symbols correspond to your methods and objects. Seriously folks, does anybody really believe that programming in this cesspool of a language increases productivity??? Given the unlimited hype about how C++ classes/code reuse/etc. increase productivity, one might think that there would be somewhere a comparison study of "time from project inception to working program" and "time spent fixing bugs" for C++ versus other languages, for other than toy programs - have any of you got such a reference? Personally, I can't think of many things more painful than having to find and fix bugs in somebody else's C++ program! >Is there something similar to lint? Even better - DON'T USE IT! > >Does C++ install cleanly from the layered products CD? (I ask this >because I ran into a problem with Pascal, which won't install without a >patch because it hits an infinite loop). Installing it was no problem. However, unlike any other language, you really want to make sure that you build everything from a single directory. This is because C++ keeps a table of the names it mangled in a subdirectory of the default directory where you run the compiler, and you really need this in one place if/when you need to translate mangled names, as when you're looking for missing symbols. Regards, David Mathog mathog@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech ************************************************************************** *Affordable VMS? See: http://seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu:8000/www/pcvms.html * **************************************************************************