[FreeVMS] Question

[Roar Thronæs]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 04:43:24AM +0000, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Renee <rmctwo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And the embarrassing thing is that I may have asked it before. Obviously we
> > are not building a VAX. We can make this thing ?source compatible? to be
> > recompiled. And I don?t think a privileged or even a CMKRNL task would work.
> > With that in mind, I?ll ask again?.what are we building? Certainly some form
> > of DCL can and must be built.
> 
> And that task is quite independent of the kernel.  DCL is a shell and
> can be written in C on top of Posix interfaces.  I'm not advocating
> that, only pointing out it's an option.
> 
> In between DCL and the kernel are the LIB$ and other VMS interfaces.
> These interfaces can be written on top of pretty much any kernel.   At
> least when we have the option to modify the kernel too.

DCL is not a shell like bash.
It is a command language interpreter, and runs in a higher kernel mode,
supervisor mode. It is covered in the VMS Internal books.
FreeVMS 0.3 had DCL with a lot of features, and it could be booted into.
(But it seems to have been deliberately forgotten.)

-- 
-Roar