[Info-vax] VAX Macro to C conversion

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/13/2019 12:30 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2019-07-13 00:38:55 +0000, Arne Vajhj said:
>> On 7/12/2019 6:37 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> In different realities, another language is often (usually?) more 
>>> appropriate than C.  And in some of those realities, wholesale 
>>> rewrites are even feasible and viable.  But that's not where many of 
>>> us are right now.  Particularly for VSI, as they've seemingly too 
>>> few folks on staff for what they need to do, much less for what they 
>>> want to do. There's always more work than there's available schedule 
>>> time, which means we're always compromising with what can get shipped 
>>> and when.
>>>
>>> Most of us working with OpenVMS are in a reality where use of C 
>>> remains endemic on OpenVMS, and where something approaching half of 
>>> all the source code present in OpenVMS is written in C, and yes, 
>>> where C is problematic and for various reasons.  That means VSI and 
>>> many of us are using C and maybe C++.  And it means we'll be looking 
>>> toward using C17/C18/C11 and features well beyond the not-really-C99 
>>> available at present on on OpenVMS.
>>
>> Is C99 to C18 really that important?
> 
> We don't yet have C99 on OpenVMS.

I am not questioning the importance of being C99 compliant.

>> When I look at the new features list then the only potentially 
>> interesting items I see are the threads and UTF support.
> 
> atomics, alignments, the bounds-checking calls from annex k, 
> type-generics, and yes, threads and UTF-8 support.

I have seen the list.

But the point I am trying to make is that I think it will
be relative rare that I would want to write some C code
that use features in C18 but not in C99.

And I am wondering whether I am unusual in that regard
or typical.

This is different from C++ where I believe that C++ 11 and 17
has lots of significant changes compared to C++ 98.

Arne