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

[Arne Vajhøj]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <78797018-2cfb-402d-9eb9-b1f109c76092 at p8g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
> 	Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> writes:
>> Since any idiot can put up a web page these days, you know it all
>> can't be true. So imagine my surprise when I bumped into this:
>>
>> http://radsoft.net/rants/20040831,00.shtml
>>
>> <quote>Dave always wanted to rewrite VMS in C. He hated Unix but loved
>> C. As soon as he'd finished VMS he suggested the rewrite. He was
>> turned down flat. Several years later he found himself in Seattle and
>> essentially was doing the rewrite in C when word came DEC were tired
>> of him.</quote>
>>
>> This article contains lots of other (possibly) questionable facts, but
>> think about the statement above "rewrite VMS in C". If this had
>> happened, we would have VMS or OpenVMS on any platform including
>> x86-64
> 
> That's funny.  I have always wanted to see a project started to take
> FreeBSD and rewrite it in Pascal or even better, Ada.  :-)
> Oh well, I suppose that could be another of those retirement projects
> I keep piling up.

C is undoubtedly easy to write OS code in (no surprise since
it was designed for this type of purpose), but it has proven to
relative hard to avoid buffer overruns, memory leaks etc.
(buffer runs are probably more relevant than memory leaks for OS).

It would be rather interesting with an OS in Ada or Modula-2/Oberon
(standard Pascal lacks too much - DEC Pascal may do).

Arne