[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Richard Maher]

On 08-May-18 11:34 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Existing VMS Pascal ported to VMS x86-64 would enable
> existing Pascal applications to move over.
> 
> And I believe that port is needed.
> 
> But I do not see a large number of new OO based
> applications pick Pascal if VMS Pascal is extended
> to support Object Pascal.
> 
> It has not happened on other platforms.
> 
> FPC is quite popular, but not for new business. For
> keeping old stuff running and for hobby usage by all
> those developers growing up with TP/BP/Delphi.
> 
> And in general I am a bit skeptical about shoehorning
> new paradigms into old languages - usually new languages
> designed for the paradigm works better.
> 
> C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, Scala, Ruby etc. will probably work
> better than Object Pascal, Ada 95, OO Cobol etc..
> 
> Arne
> 
> 
> 

Python, Nodejs should be portable?

But as I said for *many* years getting 3GLs to return JSON data should 
be the low-hanging fruit. A cross between WASD and Tier3 would be idyllic.