[Info-vax] portable sequential file formats (was: Re: Couple of questions on VMS -> world)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-19 05:44:49 +0000, David Froble said:

> So, what's wrong with using Bliss?  It's there.  It works.  It was 
> designed for this kind of stuff.

Bliss is not a language that most folks have used or even know about, 
and is not particularly available on platforms beyond DEC-related and 
not commonly used on those, and Bliss suffers from some of the same 
issues as C around memory management, pointers (keep removing dots 
until the dereference crashes and then add one dot back, etc) and 
memory management and/or garbage collection support.  Bliss has a 
massively better preprocessor and macro capabilities than does C, 
though the value of an improved preprocessor might be the subject of 
some debate with certain folks.

> I won't say MACRO-32, since I have to beat myself with an ugly stick to 
> look at some of my old code.  That's not something you do as a hobby. 
> Either lots of it, or none of it.

Macro32 does very well, particularly with the eponymous macros support, 
that for better and for worse.  As for garbage collection and memory 
management and the rest, most of the Macro32 is issues are similar to C.

Macro32 and C both require far more glue code than I'd prefer.

Rust language is more interesting (to me), though that compiler is 
probably far too new for many folks to use.  Then there's that the 
availability of Rust isn't widespread.  (Yet?)  And Rust is not yet 
available on VMS AFAIK.


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