[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/8/2018 12:06 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 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.

Lots of work.

But I believe business applications could move to OO before
all the OS interface is OOified.

>> 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.

Well - I love Pascal as a procedural language as well.

I am just not that happy with the way they added OO.

>                                                             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.

You may very well be right.

:-(

>                                    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.

It is not that difficult to identify languages with traction.

Arne