[Info-vax] The best VMS features, was: Re: openvms renaming file

[Tim Sneddon]

Michael Moroney <moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com> wrote:
> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
> 
>>On 2018-05-29, Michael Moroney <moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com> wrote:
>>> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>>>
>>>>BTW, has anyone asked you if TECO is going to be available on x86-64 ? :-)
>>>
>>> A major fan of TECO works for VSI and he will be sure it's in X86...
> 
>>That editor has now been around in one form or the other since the
>>early 1960s - I wonder how much longer it will be around for ? :-)
> 
> Apparently that's the reason why the TECO code is so ugly. It's been 
> ported from one machine to another, possibly by a conversion program in
> some cases, and by the time it made it to VAX the code was so ugly the
> Alpha Macro-32 compiler wouldn't accept it, and nobody would (could?)
> fix the code so that it would.  (It's VESTed on Alpha and the VESTed
> Alpha code is AESTed on Itanic)

It's worse than that.  From what I understand it started on the:

 o. PDP-10 and then made its way to the
 o. PDP-8 thanks to Stanley Rabinowitz, then the
 o. PDP-11 thanks to Mark Bramhall and , then the
 o. VAX with extra help from Andy Goldstein, and as you rightly stated,
    it was ported to
 o. Alpha by VEST using a bunch of macros that processed the VEST output
    files to generate a useful image.  I believe this was courtesy of
    Larry Kilgallen and finally to
 o. Itanium using AEST to tranlate the VEST'd image with a little help
    from Guy Peleg and finally myself.

There are a number of C implementations around.  I started writing a
portable bug compatible TECO-X in C which does run some things, but
is still in need of time for me to finish it (sadly, there is never
enough of that).

Regards, Tim.