[Info-vax] VAX Macro to C conversion

[Andrew Shaw]

On Tuesday, June 25, 2019 at 3:47:17 AM UTC+10, Bob Gezelter wrote:

> 
> Andrew,
> 
> There is MACRO and there is MACRO. Converting it to C is another question. The more important question is "Converting it to maintainable C". MACRO can be obscure, as coding tricks are often subtle. FORTRAN to C is easier, it is more a question of syntax.
> 
> A full, detailed inspection of the code base is in order.
> 

Hi Bob,

Very true. I'm only quite new to this organisation (but not new to VMS !!) so am still getting my head around what we have here. I am a long way from being an expert in MACRO-32 so it will take me a bit of time to understand how big this problem is.

I expect that I can quite quickly get a handle on how much MACRO code there is, but as you point out the more interesting question is what sort of MACRO code is it? What clever tricks does it do? This is effort that I am going to need to spend and I certainly don't expect any tool to magically do all this for me and anything we do do will need to be tested to within a millimetere of its life (an inch won't be anywhere near close enough!!)