[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[Paul Sture]

On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:21:07 +0200, Paul Sture wrote:

> On Wed, 23 May 2012 10:40:21 -0400, John Reagan wrote:
> 
>> Again, don't forget that you need BLISS and C just for the OS and
>> you'll want all the rest of the compilers for the customer base.  GEM's
>> old x86 target was 32-bit only, just did the things that Visual Fortran
>> required, and generated Windows object files and Windows debugging
>> info.
>>  All of that would need fixing.  And switching to some other code
>> generator (gcc, LLVM, open64) might work but I'd have to think about
>> it.
> 
> ISTR some standard utilities were written in Pascal and possibly other
> languages.  I used to see the occasional stack dump which revealed the
> language.

Someone has kindly contacted me offline with this information:

"it was revealed some years ago (at a DECUS symposium I believe) that
VMS engineering had arranged to code at least one utility that was part 
of VMS in every language available for the system. This was intended to
guarantee that the runtimes for every language would have to be included 
with VMS.

You may remember that many years back, some vendors were charging 
separately for language runtimes, so you could write programs in a 
language, but to distribute them usefully to others you had to pay toll 
to the vendors. This was a method which ensured that such a thing could 
not happen with VMS."

I recall a glitch in the system circa 1989/90 when the COBOL compiler 
shipped with run time components with a version bump that wasn't 
accompanied by appropriate patches for vanilla VMS.  We had no problem 
obtaining permission from DEC to ship the relevant run time components to 
our customers direct.

-- 
Paul Sture