[Info-vax] C History on VMS (was Re: C... the only winning move is not to play...)

[Paul Sture]

On 2014-02-12, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> On 2014-02-12 15:34:35 +0000, JohnF said:
>
>> ...I think dcl is what all those str$functions we discussed were really
>> written for. That is, but for digital's desire to provide string
>> manipulation in dcl, they never would have bothered with that
>> str$library. The C headers and stuff were more of an afterthought,
>> i.e., as long as the library's there, might as well let C link it. But
>> all other things equal, when writing C you're better advised to use
>> standard C stuff if possible.

<snip>

> In terms of the per-language support within OpenVMS, C was effectively
> an afterthought for most of the environments, as the first C compiler
> and VAXCRTL library support only arrived somewhere around V4.4 IIRC.
> That was well after the other languages.   C is also somewhat weird on
> OpenVMS in that it now has two libraries; the traditional user-mode
> library that most languages have, and also its own kernel-mode library
> that was implemented as part of the C system programming support that
> arrived around OpenVMS V6.1 IIRC.

There was a whole slew of new C stuff in the V6.2 Release Notes, locales
took many pages IIRC.

> The STR$ and LIB$ calls are generally old.  Many of the core routines
> are older than V4.4.  It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the history
> of this stuff goes back further than VAX-11/VMS too, as here's the
> XPORT library for TOPS
><http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS10_softwareNotebooks/vol08/AA-J201A-TK_XPORT_Programmers_Guide_Apr81.pdf>
>
>
> The STR$ and LIB$ calls are useful in Macro, Bliss, Fortran and various
> other languages.  (Various Fortran code was is still fond of using
> space-padded fixed-length strings, too.)  The OTS$ calls was largely
> for the compilers, but was and is available for other use.

STR$ and LIB$ calls were definitely present and documented in V3.0/V3.1.


--
Paul Sture