[Info-vax] Learning VMS application programming

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2014-09-07 17:46, David Froble wrote:
> Paul Sture wrote:
>
>> Since I just stated in another post that Fortan was the first HLL
>> language
>> available for VAX/VMS, was Bliss available to the public before it
>> appeared on the Freeware CDs?
>
> Bliss was available on the PDP-11s.  But as with other compilers, you
> had to purchase it.  Free came later.

Nope. Sadly you are incorrect. There never was a Bliss compiler on the 
PDP-11. PDP-11 Bliss code was originally cross compiled using Bliss-11, 
which ran on a PDP-10, and later cross compiled using Bliss-16 was ran 
on VMS.

This is still a nagging problem, in that some parts of RSX is written in 
Bliss, and I not know how to recompile it. Fortunately I do have the 
output from the cross compilations, and can poke at the generated code. 
Bliss-16 actually produced some pretty good code.

There was an attempt at a native Bliss compiler for the PDP-11 at DEC, 
called uBliss (or MicroBliss), but it was abandoned. I think it was 
because it was turning out to being too restricted to be usable to 
compile the code DEC had, so there was no point in continuing that work.
I have some documentation somewhere on that project, but none of the 
code, sadly.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol