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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 12/19/19 9:47 AM, John Reagan wrote:
> On Thursday, December 19, 2019 at 7:56:38 AM UTC-5, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 12/19/19 5:18 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2019-12-18, John Reagan <xyzzy1959 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 4:58:28 PM UTC-5, sector... at gmail.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> DEC of course, included RDML and SQL preprocessors - and I think the PASCAL compiler was free - which I'm sure helped.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 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.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> None of the compilers were ever free.  Discounted deeply?  Perhaps.  But never free.
>>>
>>> Was it free if you were on the licences that DEC provided to a University
>>> for academic only use ?
>>>
>>
>> I'm pretty sure CSRG was not free.  Just a real good deal.
>>
>> bill
> 
> I was ignoring things like hobbyists licenses, etc.  Jon was commenting on the work that S7 has with Pascal conversions and was guessing why Pascal might have been as popular on OpenVMS in a commercial environment.  It wasn't due to Pascal being "cheaper" than other languages.

I am sure you know that CSRG was not a Hobbyist Program.  It was
the last decent Educational Program offered  by DEC or any of its
follow-ons.

Pascal was designed as a language to teach Data Structures and
Algorithms.  It worked well and was the primary intro language
at most Universities in the 80's.  That led to Pascal becoming
a very successful language for too many uses it was not intended
for.  Luckily, enough extensions were added to make it meet the
needed requirements.

> 
> VAX Pascal V2 had an extensive set of language extensions compared to standard Wirth Pascal (aka ISO 7185).  You can actually write medium/large scale applications using the VAX Pascal V2 extensions.  I know of several customers with Pascal applications in the 10s-of-millions of lines.  VSI has active Pascal customers (I'm actually answering a technical question submitted to our support organization in another window...)
> 

I did real world Pascal on a LSI-11 in the very early 80's.
I later worked with a boss, who was also a good friend, on
a "Name Service" connection program for the Sytek Broadband
Network System (this was pre-Ethernet) written in Pascal
and running on a small Prime 50-Series.  I can still think
of a number of real world tasks that Pascal would be great
for.  I still play with Pascal on various microcomputers and
OSes.  Like COBOL and Fortran I doubt all of the Pascal in
use today will go away any time soon, even if Delphi did
its best to wreck it.

bill