e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

Some more changes to the examples

As I mentioned in the previous post, I used to own an AlphaServer 800 as my workhorse VMS machine at home, but after it had a fatal hardware issue after a staggeringly good run of over 20+ years of continuous use, I retired it and relied on access to machines at work to answer questions that I get about VMS via this web site.

One of the issues with retiring the Alpha and not replacing it was that I lost access to DTM - Digital Test Manager, which is a regression test tool that's part of the DECSet product, as we didn't use it at work.

I love DTM (apart from it's weird UI quirks, but that's fodder for another post).

It lets you set up, run, and review tests for both interactive and non-interactive programs. It even lets you set up tests for DecWindows (X11 based code)!

For the examples code, I had a bunch of tests written when the Alpha was retired, but they only covered about two thirds of the examples code base. So recently, I've started writing the missing tests, and to simplify some things, I've modified some of the code examples to be more consistent about how they do output. This makes it much easier to write the templates and filters required by DTM to perform the tests.

Additionally, while I was doing this, I noticed that there were a very few services that I hadn't done examples for (including services that arrived in VMS after I retired the Alpha). So I've added a few new examples.

Both the web pages and the consolidated ZIP file have been updated, and will continue to see updates as needed as I write the last dozen or so tests.