[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 01/23/2018 11:06 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2018-01-23 13:26:37 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:
> 
>> On 1/22/18 6:52 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 1/22/2018 7:50 PM, Richard Maher wrote:
>>>> On 23-Jan-18 8:22 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>   > Languages needed for new stuff:
>>>>>
>>>>> C - HP/VSI, will be ported
>>
>> I believe there will also be clang for C11 and later support.
> 
> That's the language.   The associated frameworks are the other part of 
> that.  We're way past needing "just" getopt_long and a few other 
> well-known C calls from gcc, and deep into needing other commonly-used 
> libraries integrated.  Examples include libtls, libxml2, libgtk+, 
> ncurses, libcurl, etc.  The IEEE POSIX 1003 API bits are a subset and 
> what is available is last-millennium.   I won't ask for libdispatch, but 
> that'd be handy for writing asynchronous programming.
> 
>> How obsolete is vsi-i64vms-php-v0506-10g-1?
> 
> php 5.6.33 is the current end of that line.  7.2.1 is current.
> 
>>>>> Python - volunteer provided version is getting old, not sure if it 
>>>>> will get ported
> 
> Somebody gets to pay for that.
> 
>>>>> Ruby - no idea of status
>>
>> There is a vsi-i64vms-ruby-v0202-2i-1 kit available. I don't know how 
>> current that is.
> 
> 2.5.0 is current.
> 
>> Among those not mentioned, there is Lua (vsi-i64vms-lua-v0502-3-1 is 
>> available now) and Perl. I don't expect "porting" Perl to involve much 
>> more than tinkering with how the configuration script deals with 
>> architecture names.
> 
> Lua 5.3.4 is current.
> 
> The Perl kit isn't current, either.
> 
> C++, Fortran, COBOL and various other "OpenVMS-traditional" languages 
> are fairly far behind current standards, too.

But, at least with COBOL, that isn't much of a problem as the world of
real users didn't ask for and has, so far, chosen to ignore most of the
fluff added since 85.  :-)

> 
> Somebody really needs to be testing "head" for Lua, Perl and Python and 
> the rest, and I don't think that's happening with any of the community 
> programming language.  And I'm routinely seeing breakage.
> 
> And the SSL-related changes are tipping over various parts of the whole 
> environment.
> 
> Nobody's mentioned an IDE here yet, and that's basically a requirement 
> for most modern developers.   

Anybody here ever try jGrasp?  Oh wait, can't have much of an IDE
without a desktop to run it on.  You did say "modern developers", right?

bill