[Info-vax] DCL Integer Overflow

[Craig A. Berry]

On 7/2/17 4:58 PM, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> Den 2017-07-02 kl. 23:41, skrev Simon Clubley:
>> On 2017-07-02, Robert A. Brooks <FIRST.LAST at vmssoftware.com> wrote:
>>> On 7/2/2017 1:21 AM, mcleanjoh at gmail.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  From the June 2017 VMS Roadmap, under "Research Areas" (slide 3) ...
>>>>
>>>> "Additional Scripting Languages"
>>>>
>>>> I guess we'll learn more the track but maybe it will incorporate 64-bit
>>>> integers and all the associated changes that this would require 
>>>> (e.g. lexical
>>>> functions overlaying system services).
>>>
>>> The thought is that DCL will always be the command parser, and some 
>>> other
>>> language (likely open source) would be used for scripting.
>>>
>>
>> Will you be running this scripting language as a normal user mode
>> (not supervisor mode) image without any privileges other than those
>> already granted to the user ?
>>
> 
> Isn't that how perl, Python and similar tools are run today?
> And if so, why change anything?

Indeed. And Perl goes farther in that if the Perl image was installed
with privileges, those are disabled at start-up time, knocking you back
down to whatever the user has.

And Perl *can* have 64-bit integer types if you configure it to do so at
the time Perl is built. I've never made that the default since doubling
the amount of memory required for everything isn't (to me) such an
obvious win. Ironically, DCL, since it has no data structures to speak
of, wouldn't really notice using 64 bits to store integer symbols; since
there are no arrays, you're never going to have an array of millions of
64-bit integers.