[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-05-08 15:34:16 +0000, Arne Vajhj said:

> On 5/8/2018 11:09 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> As for those wondering why Free Pascal might be more interesting than 
>> the existing OpenVMS implementation, have a look at the difference in 
>> features: https://freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/ref.html  Among other 
>> differences, OpenVMS Pascal hasn't yet added object-oriented 
>> programming support.   Wouldn't surprise me to find that some future 
>> version of Pascal for OpenVMS either incorporates some of the features 
>> from Free Pascal, Delphi and ilk, though that's some years into the 
>> future and long after the completion of the OpenVMS x86-64 port.  Or 
>> maybe Free Pascal gets ported to OpenVMS x86-64.  Most of the 
>> "traditional" OpenVMS programming languages and the associated and 
>> underlying OpenVMS APIs and the vendors' development tools haven't 
>> moved forward substantially in ~twenty years.  Yes, VSI does aim to 
>> change that.
> 
> Software development on VMS definitely need to move to OO.

The underlying operating system bits and the development tools in 
support of OO are likely as big an effort as would be the work on the 
compilers.  If not larger.  Message-passing implementation work, 
endemic Unicode support, modifications to the system calls to return 
the the requested data, debugging tool updates and process dump 
updates, all the design and documentation and testing work, more than a 
little work optimizing of the results, etc.

> But I don't know if OOifying VMS Pascal is a good thing.
> 
> I love Pascal as a language, but it is not a language with a great 
> future ahead.
> ...
> And in general I am a bit skeptical about shoehorning new paradigms 
> into old languages - usually new languages designed for the paradigm 
> works better.

Shoehorning changes into operating systems, too.

> C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, Scala, Ruby etc. will probably work better than 
> Object Pascal, Ada 95, OO Cobol etc..

Pascal, BASIC, COBOL and related wouldn't be at the top of my 
overhaul-and-update-to-OO list, ether.  But this thread was referencing 
Pascal and Simon is quite fond of Wirth's approaches.  It'd be 
interesting to see how willing existing OpenVMS developers working in 
each of the existing languages would be to move forward, but I'm not 
hopeful folks heavily invested in procedural designs and tools would be 
looking to change their approaches.  Which would probably mean focusing 
on languages interesting to new folks and to the existing OpenVMS folks 
in the installed base that are interested in moving forward and 
adapting and adopting, while maintaining the existing environments and 
with an incremental migration likely eventually occurring for those 
apps.  C and C++ forward to more current implementations (chunks of 
which basically fall out of the LLVM work, and that once folks haul 
their source code across from the DEC-traditional front-ends and 
syntax), and maybe Rust and maybe Go.  Possibly some work on Fortran, 
particularly if VSI makes a play for the sites using R and Fortran and 
related developers.  Trade-offs here abound, such as what existing 
developers want as compared with what newer ISVs and newer developers 
want.



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