[Info-vax] [OT] Wirth style languages, was: Re: Obscure Ada compiler vendors?

[Keith Parris]

On 4/4/2013 11:01 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> Rewriting all of OpenVMS?  That'd lead me to this state:
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L6i5AwVAbs>. Even if you were to be
> successful with a rewrite, once you're done with that very substantial
> and years-long effort and investment, you would have something
> approximating current-day VMS. Not the features and functions that
> folks would would want and would expect after all those years.
...
> The rest of the
> market is not standing still here, and you're talking about a project
> that took three or five years last time (Alpha to Itanium) for a fairly
> straight port with very few changes, and with an engineering team that
> was very familiar with VMS assigned to the effort full-time.   ~Thirty
> million lines of Bliss and C and Macro32 is a huge project to
> reconstitute.

By this logic, the GNU project and Linux could never have caught up 
with, much less surpassed or exceeded, UNIX capabilities.