[Info-vax] VAX Macro to C conversion

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-07-26 20:31:39 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> ...Because of what I initially read into the discussion...

Well, if we're discussing what we'd rather be working on and 
with—rather what what we have now and will have for the foreseeable 
future within C and C++ on OpenVMS and more generally, and which is 
ASCIZ—then I'd much prefer dealing with Objective-C and NSString 
objects.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsstring?language=objc

As compared with what NSString provides, the capabilities of ASCIZ, 
ASCID, and ASCIC all seem rather archaic.

I've long had issues with the ASCIC, ASCID, Unicode, and UTF-8 support 
available within C on OpenVMS.

But with C and C++ on OpenVMS and with C and C++ in general, we're 
going to be working with ASCIZ strings for the foreseeable future.

Which means strl or _s calls, where available and permissible.  Or 
std::string or ilk, where that's applicable.

And hacking together our own code for dealing with ASCIC, ASCID, 
Unicode, and UTF-8, where that's necessary.

Yes, I do know from dscdef.h, and descrip.h, and the RTL calls for 
descriptors and related, and with all the glue code that entails, and 
from various of the Freeware, but thank you very much for the 
suggestions there.

Yes, I wouldn't mind a better option than C or C++ for the sorts of 
tasks I'm usually working with on OpenVMS, but that's not going to be 
BASIC or Fortran or COBOL or Ada or Pascal or Macro32 or Macro64 or IAS 
or NASM or GAS or whatever language you might prefer.  Not right now, 
and not as presently constituted, and not for the near- to mid-term.  
That might eventually become Rust or maybe Swift 
https://swift.org/server/ or maybe Go, but those too are at least 
several years out on OpenVMS...  And for now, it's mostly C or maybe 
C++, and preferably C17/C18 and C++17.

And I'm well aware that buffer overflows are not the only sort of 
vulnerability that can exist.  As undoubtedly is Craig, and as is most 
everybody else that's been watching C and C++ programming, and security.




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