[Info-vax] How Do You Define Record (Data Structure) Dummy Arguments in

[sector7usallc at gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 28, 2019 at 6:29:52 PM UTC-5, seasoned_geek wrote:
> On Monday, August 19, 2019 at 6:42:10 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 
> > I was not making any judgment about the language just doing the math:
> > VMS is a very small OS and Basic is a small language in the VMS world
> > making VMS Basic skills rather rare.
> > 
> 
> Honestly, BASIC is a very large language in the OpenVMS world. Nearly every DEC VAR hawking a customizable ERP system during the 1980s and 1990s wrote it with BASIC. Most of them ported from Singer, PDP or MIA Basic IV. I believe there were 4 such companies in the Chicagoland area. LIOCS was one and I worked there. There was another one up in the Northbrook area owned by a friend of the owners of LIOCS at the time.
> 
> MCBA was the only notable exception from that era.
> 
> Many of the shops looking for VAX BASIC people today are still running customized ERP packages from the 1980s, pre-relational database. Navistar, Brake Parts and a sugar company in southern IL are all still running TOLAS. Some Honda factories are probably still running it too.
> 
> It would not surprise me if The Pampered Chef was still running the LIOCS software under the hood for their MLM stuff. They had a version of the LIOCS software customized for that business. Companies have gotten very good at hiding the fact they are running VAX BASIC under the hood by connecting it to a Web front end.
> 
> Until they got rid of the actual trading floor, the Chicago Stock Exchange's entire trading floor system was written in VAX BASIC. Actually PDP BASIC ported to VAX ported to Alpha ported to Itanium. They got rid of it when they got rid of the trading floor but customized versions of that trading floor software were sold internationally to quite a few exchanges in quite a few countries including China a Thailand. 
> 
> Pascal on the other hand, now there is an obscure dead language. In my 30+ years of IT consulting at many large companies in the Chicagoland area, I _never_ encountered it. There was one word processor written by a girl and her company who used to come into the DEC Elk Grove Village office which was written in Pascal, but I have never encountered a production system using even one line of it.
> 
> COBOL and Cognos PowerHouse much more prevalent in this area than Pascal ever was.
> 
> Btw, Navistar does have a FORTRAN compiler. It is on the systems which support the Melrose Park plant. Even if Melrose is 100% gone, that system got moved somewhere, it was core. The reason I know this is the system written in Fortran had a decade problem. It had a single digit year and once every 10 years someone went to Melrose and modified the system to handle the new 9 to 0 transition. It was a production line system so no, changing it to use the entire year simply wasn't worth it. These records rolled down the assembly line ever day then really had no purpose. It was the only system we knew to be Y2K compliant because it had been through this 3 times before.
> 
> As to your other post ranking languages for use with RMS files.
> 
> 0.) Cognos PowerHouse - The best 4GL ever to be written for the platform.
> 1.) DIBOL - A really awesome language I rarely get to work with
> 2.) BASIC - if you don't need to perform many sorts requiring DCL
> 3.) COBOL - They should have left things at COBOL-85
> 4.) FORTRAN90 - When FORTRAN finally got real
> 
> ...
> 32767.) PASCAL
> 4.) FORTRAN


We developed a VMS PASCAL to C++ for e European corporation, and recently have been contacted by a number of well-known brand names running huge amounts of VMS PASAL in production.

PASCAL was mainly a European preferred language .. my first language (and the only structured language at that time) was PASCAL on a DEC SYSTEM 10.

In Europe for 1980 era graduates, PASCAL was the only option other than COBOL.

If you liked COBOL you got a job on an IBM, if you considered yourself and interactive (VT’s)  DEC was your natural home – especially with so many DEC 10’s as most Comp Sci’s first computer. Hell I remember, at Hatfield, we had 10 VT52’s running at 300baud, which compared to the teletypes were jaw dropping.

Having written the VMS PASCAL to C++ and all the associated runtime, I can see why its loved. the generated code is incredibly fast, and PASCAL's stricture stops many of the C (mainly) but also C++ coding errors.

I was amazed that VMS PASCAL even included templates.

DEC of course, included RDML and SQL preprocessors - and I think the PASCAL compiler was free - which I'm sure helped.

Obviously, the issue, like so much of VMS is not the technology, its finding new blood to work on top down, non-client server, non GUI (DEC FORMS doesn’t count) and an operating system with less and less users – and not much $$ benefit for their career.

Of course, Borland object orientated PASCAL is still popular.

It’s also amazing how many serious applications (world-wide) are still written in FORTRAN – obviously control systems, but also some very well-known financial application. FORTRAN was also a free VAX language which I’m sure added to its popularity in the financial arena.

Our first product was A PDP-11 BASIC/+2 RSTS to C translator which then became VMS BASIC to C. These days, we rarely get requests for VMS BASIC.  BASIC was also a DEC world-wide language.  BASIC was extremely popular with what used to bed called VAR’s – small software houses selling their applications on PDP-11 and then VMS. As BASIC was really the only commercial language on the PDP-11 its popularity on VAX was “legacy”.

Other language converters as you’d expect are also world-wide VMS COBOL to ANSI COBOL – strangely difficult to convert 100%.

DEC naturally did a great job locking users and VAR’s into VMS, every language heavily extended from its ANSI standard (other than BASIC which never got one).

MUMPS is still amazingly popular – even in non-medical fields – but InterSystem’s have done a good job of keeping it portable and current.

DIBOL, I think has been laid to rest.

It always amazed me how the DEC languages had such regional popularity.

Interestingly the same was true for SMG, FMS, TDMS and DEC FORMS. When we migrate clients, we still find SMG and FMS hugely popular. Naturally once SMG’s got its fingers in your code – it’s there for good. Oddly, I’d say that our migrations to Linux are around 50% split between FMS and DEC FORMS.

Jon Power
CEO Sector7