[Info-vax] Some questions on software for VMS 7.3 VAX

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-01-12 14:10:04 +0000, Bob Koehler said:

> In article <mailman.114.1452527624.14919.info-vax_rbnsn.com at rbnsn.com>, 
> lists at openmailbox.org writes:
>> On Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:23:48 -0500
>> Stephen Hoffman via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 2016-01-11 14:35:16 +0000, Bob Koehler said:
>>> 
>>>> In article <mailman.25.1452503591.23756.info-vax_rbnsn.com at rbnsn.com>,
>>>> lists at openmailbox.org writes:
>>>> 
>>>>> Fortran 90/95
>>>> 
>>>> I think VAXen are stuck at Fortran 77.
>> 
>> That would be somewhat surprising. Would they really put the VAX out to 
>> pasture when it came to something VMS/VAX was so famous for!?

So is that trolling, willful blindness, or genuine ignorance?

Yes, the VAX compilers are fossils.   Not that the current compilers on 
Alpha and Integrity aren't now a revision or two behind the current 
major language standards, too.

VAX is utterly and totally dead, having been replaced over twenty years ago.

That replacement was during the era before Windows 95 and Windows NT 
became established, too.

OpenVMS itself is very much on a retirement and deprecation schedule 
over at HPE.

Whether existing sites migrate to VSI products, or migrate off of OpenVMS?

OpenVMS may still be entirely dead too, if VSI can't find and pull some 
sufficiently profitable rabbits out of their hat.

But VAX?  VAX was a pain to back-port software to back in the 1990s 
after the OS forked, and the problems and the effort involved in 
backports has only increased , and particularly increased after 64-bit 
support was added to OpenVMS.   This other than BASIC, Macro32 and 
Bliss32, that is — most of the other compilers moved to newer standards 
and to 64-bit support and to newer code generation tools and APIs.   
The migration from VCG to GEM was already mentioned else-thread, and 
code generation is being entirely replaced again with LLVM with the 
x86-64 port.

>    Yes, I remember when HP, Sun, an IBM were pushing that thier UNIX 
> workstations had Fortran compilers that were compatable with "VAX 
> Fortran".
> 
>    Sadly, that is no longer the defacto industry standard.  I get much 
> better support from gfortran on other platforms.

VAX and OpenVMS in general has not been the industry standards in much 
of anything since the 1990s.  Not in anything that folks were willing 
to pay for.

-- 
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