[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/24/2018 3:31 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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.

Very few of the old languages are really portable.

Pascal programs were not portable between VMS and Borland.

But many Fortran programs were not portable (like betwen VMS and IBM)
either. Unless the vendor supported "VAX extensions", which IBM did
not but many smaller vendors did.

Same with many C programs - C just provides the workaround that you can 
put in a gazillion #ifdef #endif blocks to handle the specific code.

A little outside my area of expertise but I have also been told that
moving code between VMS Cobol and IBM Cobol is not just a matter of
recompiling.

Newer languages are often more portable.

They have stricter rules for semantics with little or no implementation
specific behavior.

They have huge standard libraries that reduce the need for platform
specific functions.

> 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.  :-)

You mean like kept it for writing OS'es?

:-)

Arne