[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 01/24/2018 02:54 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> 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.
> 

I wasn't saying no one did.  I know a company out of Penn Yan, NY
that made a business out of systems done in UCSD Pascal. (They also
did ports of UCSD Pascal to ensure their applications were, in fact,
portable to multiple systems.  I currently have Pascal for 6 different
systems that I am running here at the moment.  Multiple different
Pascals for some of them.  None of them compatible at the source
level!!


But that doesn't change the fact that none of this is what Pascal
was intended for and except for people (like VMS and GNU) who tried
to implement as many of the non-standard extensions as they could
manage none of it was ever portable.

The first problem is a good example of what is the biggest problem
with everyone here's favorite language, C.  If people hadn't worked
so hard to use it for tasks for which it was not designed and uses
for which it was not intended there would be a lot less problems
with it.  :-)

bill