A Vienna Base System

  One requirement of large software projects is the possibility to compile and run programs under different UNIX derivates and possibly VMS without changing any source code. This functionality is realized by the Vienna Base System (VBS) project. The VBS library is used by the VLisp LISP interpreter and VMake itself. It provides the developer an operating system independent low level functionality for different system operations. The functionality of the VBS library can be summarized as follows:

1. A common error system for handling debug, informational, warning, error and fatal messages.
2. A system independent implementation of regular expressions.
3. A unit calculation library working on strings.
4. A common command line interface with easy definition for the developer.
5. System independent handling of file names, common file and directory access.
6. A process interface for interactive, sub-, detached and batch processes, whereby a callback is invoked by process termination.
7. Low level I/O handling.
8. A printer interface.
9. Handling system time, time stamps and timeouts.
10. Data compression with callback functions.

 
• A.1 Definition of a Callback
• A.2 Error System
• A.3 Regular Expressions
• A.4 Unit Calculations
• A.5 System Interface
• A.6 Data Compression
• A.7 VBS Data Types