[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <H4CdnVlBSu7h44PWnZ2dnUVZ_rNi4p2d at giganews.com>, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> writes:
>> To those of us not programming in Macro, the Alpha was just a faster 
>> VAX!  Much faster!!!
> 
>    I know there is a lot of junk out there, but all the Macro-32 I had
>    written before I got my first Alpha compiled much easier than the
>    Fortran or C.  (There were a few missing features in the first ship
>    Fortran and C compilers.)
> 

ISTR that a VAX to Alpha port was usually just a matter of compile, link 
and run.  If your code expected 512 byte pages, you had a problem.  Most 
of the code I dealt with was written in FORTRAN and didn't know or care 
what the page size was.  If you did naughty things like bit twiddling 
floating point numbers you had to adapt your code to the new floating 
point format.

People who had data files with binary floating point had to convert 
them.  I don't recall it as being a problem although I'm sure some 
people did have problems.