[Info-vax] VMS port to x86

[Neil Rieck]

On May 29, 6:55 pm, "John Reagan" <johnrrea... at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >"Fritz Wuehler"  wrote in message
> >news:688da0947b8b8deb5e49baab8907fe43 at msgid.frell.theremailer.net...
> >>"John Reagan" <johnrrea... at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >> However, for some reason, the VMS customer base uses other languages like
> >> COBOL, Fortran, BASIC, Pascal, and even Ada.  Don't forget them.
> >Yes but those other languages are all available for x86. gcc already
> >supports many platforms, can it be that difficult to generate VAX ABI calls
> >given the x86 code generation itself is already there?
>
> Most of the VMS compilers have lots of extensions beyond the
> industry-substandard.  For instance, OpenVMS Pascal is way beyond what you'd
> get from the gcc-based Pascal (I have that installed on my Linux box).  The
> ability in BASIC, COBOL, etc. to build OpenVMS descriptors wouldn't be found
> in any other variant for x86.  It isn't gcc that I'd be worried about, it is
> the random combination of frontends you'd have to enhance.

This is true of VMS-BASIC if you only consider the fact that it has
built-in ISAM support. I can't remember if it was COBOL-74 or COBOL-85
(or perhaps the industry discussions between them), but you could only
call it "a standard COBOL implementation" if it had built-in ISAM
support. So DEC followed IBM's lead and placed full ISAM support into
VMS. (in the RSX-11/RT-11 days you needed to buy a license for the
indexing piece of RMS). Once a full ISAM API was there, it quickly
leaked into other products like VMS-BASIC.

Indexing was also done (to a lesser extent) in the UNIX world (at
least the BSD world) for COBOL, but COBOL was never as popular as C;
and ISAM on UNIX was never as popular as relational (this is where
Oracle takes off). But lack of standard ISAM modules in UNIX can only
be the explanation for why many C programers today are unable to wrap
their brains around record processing (most always want to open a file
with "fopen()" then produce stream i/o)

There are other aspects of VMS-BASIC which are truly unique to DEC/CPQ/
HP. WHEN-ERROR blocks and MATRIX commands are the first which spring
to mind.

As others have already pointed out, the main work in porting the so-
called "DEC languages" will be done once in the GEM back end.

NSR

p.s. according to this link:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/30th/t_past_text.html#1980
VMS-BASIC first appears in 1980 and is called "BASIC Multikey ISAM".