[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[John Reagan]

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 2:43:51 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/24/2018 1:59 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> >     It is always a bad idea to bet on non-standard features in
> > any language.  It is one of the reasons Pascal languished outside
> > of academia (which is where it was designed for, not to teach a
> > language but to teach concepts.)
> 
> Really?
> 
> The by far largest Pascal code base must have been
> TurboPascal & Delphi on PC.
> 
> And that code was typical replaced with C++ code
> using lots of OLE, COM, MFC and ATL.
> 
> That type of C++ is not more portable than
> Pascal.
> 

Besides "classic" Pascal (ISO 7185), we also did Extended Pascal (ISO 10206) which intended to standardize existing practice.  The Borland folks attended and provided input but never adopted anything.  The did submit suggestions for things like PEEK and POKE which hardly standard other than being under the letter "P" in the appendix.

VMS Pascal has most of Extended Pascal (ie, schema types are directly from the standard, etc.).  In places where we have the identical feature as EP, we left our traditional syntax in place with the promise that we'd add the 2nd spelling if/when some other compiler implemented the same.  Only Prospero Pascal (now defunct) did the full standard.

VMS customers have written large and complex applications in Pascal.  I know of several customers each with millions of lines of Pascal code.