I've missed the beginning of this thread, so forgive me if I am
repeating someone's posting but our Biological Computing Division has
just moved all the sequence analysis software from a VAX to a SGI and
I thought I could share my impressions. The GCG package definitely
runs faster on the SGI but this seems to have little to do with the
UNIX vs VMS issue, as the SGI hardware is simply much more powerful
than the VAX that we used to have. As to the relationship between GCG,
VMS and UNIX, according to me the GCG package 'flavour' remains
'VMS-ish' even if implemented on UNIX. The command line parameters are
preceded by slashes instead of hyphens, there is a genhelp command
instead of a man page and I haven't figured it out how to do output
redirection and background processing with the GCG commands
efficiently. What I mean is that, IMHO, UNIX fans would probably find
it more natural to type something like:
% (stringsearch -l embl -s 'human globin' > glob.out) >& glob.log &
instead of what is now available with the GCG. A minor, but annoying,
problem with genhelp, would be that many UNIX folks would be tempted
to press space instead of return to view the next help page, which of
course would put them out of the help topic.
Anyway, GCG is GCG and I am just a biologist who is trying to
understand computers, so all mistakes and inaccuraces were due to
ignorance.
Regards,
Christo
