OpenVMS has a very confusing way of changing the current directory, compared to UNIX or Windows. There's a popular freeware replacement for the CD command, which is extremely featureful, but has the downside of being written in VAX macro assembly language, which has to be compiled to native code on the newer CPU architectures that VMS supports: Alpha, Itanium, and soon x86-64.

I decided to try to translate the 22-year-old VAX MACRO source code to modern C++, using the same OpenVMS functions, but with a more idiomatic coding style that will hopefully be educational to people seeking to learn OpenVMS development.

This is still a work in progress, but I wanted to sync the repo with the code that I've been working on, to encourage me to finish it. The original code is checked in under original-src. The current version compiles and echoes its arguments. I'm still translated and wiring up the functionality, but you can see the C++ wrappers that I've written so far to abstract the low-level VMS details.

References:

• OpenVMS documentation
• OpenVMS coding examples