OpenVMS RTL Library (LIB$) Manual

This document, published in December 1995, serves as a comprehensive usage and reference guide for system and application programmers using the LIB$ and CVT$ facilities of the OpenVMS Run-Time Library (RTL).

The manual is structured into an overview, a detailed LIB$ reference section, and a CVT$ reference section. The LIB$ facility provides a callable interface to OpenVMS operating system components, including system services, the command language interpreter (CLI), and VAX/Alpha machine instructions. It supports a wide array of functions such as allocating process resources (virtual memory, event flags), converting data types for I/O, enabling hardware exception detection, establishing condition handlers, generating timing statistics, managing strings and binary trees, obtaining system date/time information, processing cross-reference data, handling DECnet/OSI full names, and searching for files. For Alpha systems, most LIB$ routines support 64-bit virtual addressing, with specialized _64 suffixed routines for operations in the 64-bit virtual address space.

The CVT$ facility focuses on data type conversions, such as converting floating-point data types using routines like CVT$CONVERT_FLOAT. This manual updates and supersedes previous versions for OpenVMS AXP Version 6.1 and OpenVMS VAX Version 6.1, and is applicable to OpenVMS Alpha Version 7.0 and OpenVMS VAX Version 7.0.