[Info-vax] VAX Macro to C conversion

[Terry Kennedy]

On Saturday, July 20, 2019 at 1:17:46 PM UTC-4, Dave Froble wrote:
> Back to computers, I know and like Basic.  I don't know C, and when I've 
> tried to read it, I get headaches.  Maybe the hammer is the correct tool 
> for some people.

Way-back-when in the late 70's / early 80's when I was half of a company selling CP/M, MP/M and TurboDOS-based systems into the commercial market, anything that didn't have to be in assembler (an example of must-be-assembler was the BIOS), everything was written in a language I wrote from scratch called IBL (Integer Basic Language). It was (as the name says) integer-only and it pretty much translated BASIC statements one-at-a-time into Z80 assembler. It also had no runtime library - everything was in the generated code. We had some amazing stuff - take a look at https://www.glaver.org/cpmstuff/pc8cpm.txt if you're interested - our CP/M had an interrupt-driven background print spooler and all sorts of other goodies written in IBL.

This was before C had poked its head much above Bell Labs and the university environment. I think the only available compiler was Whitesmith's and it was incredibly expensive and produced much larger executables than IBL.