[Info-vax] Most popular application programming languages on VMS ?

[gérard Calliet]

Le 10/01/2019 à 13:06, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk a écrit :
> On Wednesday, 9 January 2019 18:52:45 UTC, Bill Gunshannon  wrote:
>> On 1/9/19 1:28 PM, gérard Calliet wrote:
>>> Le 08/01/2019 à 15:19, Bill Gunshannon a écrit :
>>>> On 1/8/19 8:51 AM, abrsvc wrote:
>>>>> On Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 8:19:14 AM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>>> All this talk about programming languages has made me wonder what
>>>>>> the most popular application programming languages are on VMS, both
>>>>>> today and in the past.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Since the language options are going to vary with application type
>>>>>> (you are not going to see a lot of scientific programming in COBOL
>>>>>> for example :-)), this is across the VMS base as a whole and not
>>>>>> across one specific section of it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Does anyone know the answer ?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Simon.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -- 
>>>>>> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
>>>>>> Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world
>>>>>
>>>>> I can only talk about the ones for the sites that I support...
>>>>>
>>>>> The most common that I see are:
>>>>>
>>>>> FORTRAN
>>>>> COBOL
>>>>> C
>>>>> BASIC
>>>>>
>>>>> Others seen but not particularly actively used in new development:
>>>>>
>>>>> DIBOL
>>>>> MACRO-32
>>>>> PASCAL
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Don't forget Ada.  The VAX running VMS had one of the
>>>> first validated compilers and saw use pretty much from
>>>> the very first VAX to hit the streets.  I saw it in the
>>>> very early 80's.
>>>>
>>>> bill
>>>>
>>> +1
>>>
>>> But I dont't know how many of them went to DEC Ada Alpha. THe few who
>>> used GNAT Ada Itanium are no more here (said by Adacore, difficult to
>>> evaluate because they have a political decision of stopping their
>>> support for VMS).
>>>
>>> It seems that thinking about a future for Ada on VMS involves being able
>>> of addressing the complete set of needs: support and port (to x86)  of
>>> all the VAX and Alpha Ada compiler (DEC Ada first, but there are another
>>> Ada compiler for VAX/VMS), support and port (to x86) of GNAT Ada
>>> Itanium, and creating an Ada compiler for VMS x86.
>>>
>>> Everything is possible, and it seems it would be better to have a global
>>> offer on this domain - everything is possible *if* it can make sense in
>>> term of business, for sure.
>>>
>>> To have an Ada compiler on VMS x86 it can be made by 2 different means:
>>> - gcc cross compiled from Linux - as we have made for our built for VMS
>>> Itanium, => I'm not sure it is even possible, with issues of
>>> compatibility in pushing a strange gcc idiomatic x86 image in a llvm world,
>>> - Adacore will have this year a prototype of Ada compiler using LLVM as
>>> a back end ; we can plug this front end to the VMS LLVM back end => it
>>> is the most rational idea, but we'll have to wait from Adacore, and
>>> Adacore says llvm will never be their principal stream of development.
>>>
>>
>> Aren't Ada compilers still required to be validated? Isn't that
>> likely to be a work intensive and expensive proposition?  Is
>> there enough of a customer base to justify the time and expense?
>>
>> bill
> 
> Sometimes it's total revenue/profit, not number of customers, that
> counts. So "popularity" isn't necessarily the right word, depending
> on where the question is intended to lead.
> 
> One such example might be in VMS-hosted embedded-targetted Ada, ie
> the product that started life in the VMS V4 era on VAX as XD Ada.
> It was a DEC Ada front end (thus familiar to lots of developers of
> the day) and a code generator primarily targeting M68K, MIL1750,
> and a few other things likely to be unfamiliar to many readers
> round here.
> XD Ada was also integrated in a marvellously helpful way with the
> VMS debugger, or was it with the VAXELN debugger. Anyway it was
> nicely done even on VAX/VMS. It did eventually support VMS on Alpha
> as host.
> 
> Last time I looked (3 years ago?) it was still alive and saleable,
> if you knew who to call, and subject to the required non-trivial
> budget for mandatory support. There was even a version hosted on
> current VMS on Itanium.
> 
> By a weird chain of (de)mergers and acquisitions it had ended up
> under HP control again (something like DEC+SD-Scicon -> EDS->
> DECPQ -> HPQ -> DXC-> HP???? doesn't really matter), so who knows
> where its future will be.
> 
> Are there many similar VMS-centric products whose future depends
> more on revenue/profit rather than "popularity" ? Who knows...
> 
Lot of thanks quoting them.

I contacted them, and alas, it is the same not so good story with VMS. 
Their team around that has being shrinking and they agree something has 
to be done to go on, but not yet because of resources problems. I hope 
there will be something new one day or another.

I didn't know about Debugging that included targets and it is a good 
news for me because one of my goals is to redo that in the Itanium built 
I have done.

Gérard Calliet