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

[Paul Raulerson]

On Nov 7, 2009, at 8:25 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________

Mmm- it is not difficult to avoid buffer overruns or memory leaks or  
any other
problems that a lot of people think are endemic to C. You just have to  
know
what you are doing, and *that* is true no matter what language you use.

Indeed, it is true of *anything* you do, but especially so in an  
programming
exercise.

-Paul