How VMS IDE handles EOL characters

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cgoodwin
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How VMS IDE handles EOL characters

Post by cgoodwin » Thu Oct 03, 2019 12:07 pm

Before I get to deep into this topic, I'd just like to state that I have read the documentation, and I do realize that for the EOL character, in big bold letters, the wiki reads: You must use LF. I would like to understand why this restriction is in place, and that's the goal of this post.

As a little bit of background as to why this is important to me, we currently have our source code stored on the VMS machine, as well as in a repository. The code in the repository has CRLF as the EOL character. When I pull in our code from VMS, it comes in as LF. The repository sees these files and detects changes on all of them.

As a test, I created a new file on my local machine, set it's EOL to CRLF, did a Synchronize to upload it to VMS, compiled and ran the code from the file using the VMS IDE (everything seemed to work just fine), then I deleted my local copy, Sychronized again and it still came back to me as CRLF. As per this test, this requirement of using LF does not seem enforced, so that makes me wonder why it is important. Any insight into this topic would be greatly appreciated!


sergey_vorfolomeev
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Re: How VMS IDE handles EOL characters

Post by sergey_vorfolomeev » Fri Oct 04, 2019 12:39 am

VMS IDE doesn't handle EOL. Compiler does. For example COBOL fails with "Invalid character (hexadecimal 0D)", PASCAL fail with "Illegal ASCII character", MSG fails with "error parsing". To get rid of such issues we decided to use LF instead of CRLF wherever.

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