Overview

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS have addressed the DCL programming environment, error handling, and CTRL/Y interrupt handling. These three aspects of DCL application design are by far the most complicated. You have gotten through the most difficult part of this book. With the knowledge gained so far, you can structure an entire DCL application, large or small, and feel confident that the application will behave in a consistent and reliable fashion.

This chapter brings together all the information presented so far in order to demonstrate one method of structuring an entire application. It also describes some conventions that should be followed when developing an application so that the application will be compatible with other OpenVMS applications and can coexist with them.

10.1 Naming Conventions

A wide variety of software products can be simultaneously installed and running on a OpenVMS system. Such products may be provided by DIGITAL, by third-party software vendors, or by your own development staff. In order to prevent these products from interfering with one another, a series of guidelines must be followed by each and every product. These guidelines are presented in the OpenVMS document entitled Guide to Creating OpenVMS Modular Procedures. The majority of guidelines do not pertain to DCL, but a few important ones do. These are the naming conventions for various system objects, such as logical names and files. If you adhere to the naming conventions carefully, your DCL application will not interfere with other applications written in DCL or any other language. The...