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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/21/2019 11:13 PM, Jonathan wrote:
> On Thursday, December 19, 2019 at 7:28:34 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 12/19/2019 9:47 AM, John Reagan wrote:
>>> 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...)
>> It was a good choice.
>>
>> Lots of students was taught Pascal back then.
>>
>> Pascal is way more modern than Cobol, Fortran and Basic.
> 
> I don't think Pascal circa 1975 was more modern than VAX Basic circa 1985.  Of course the last time I wrote much Pascal code was about 1975 (using the Wirth CDC compiler :)

I am far from an expert in VMS basic.

But Pascal had the many of the language features that would dominate the 
next 20-30 years:
* declarations required
* common data types
* 3 types of loops, if and cases
* support for recursion
* support for complex data structures (incl. variant record)
* string type
* pointer type (type safe)

And on top of that a tradition among Pascal programmers for
well structured procedural programming with not too long
procedures/functions.

Way more modern than Fortran.

I would expect it to be more modern than VMS Basic as well.
But as I said then VMS Basic is not something I know well.

Arne