[Info-vax] C99 stuff (Re: The Road to V9.0)

[John Reagan]

On Friday, June 7, 2019 at 3:17:20 PM UTC-4, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:

> 
> Back in the day, DEC's compilers were widely recognized as the  best, 
> and in many cases were the de-facto industry standard.  I'd like to see 
> that revived.  In particular, it would be nice if Fortran were brought 
> up to date.  Reasonable versions of Pascal, C, C++, Cobol, and Basic 
> would be nice.
> 

As I mentioned, you'll get modern C++ (and C) via our port of clang.  

We're looking at porting flang when they have their rewrite finished (that will get you Fortran 2018 support).  Looking at their timeframe, perhaps with our V9.2 timeframe give or take.  https://github.com/flang-compiler/flang

What do you mean for "reasonable" Pascal, COBOL, and BASIC?  We're not planning any wholesale standards work (there is no reasonable standard for BASIC if you ask me - we already took a different path).  For Pascal, no new standard since Extended Pascal from 1989 (and we have much of that today).  For COBOL, we *NOT* going to add the object-oriented features from the latest standard.  For these languages, we'll just be reactive to customer requests.  For instance, Pascal has 64-bit pointers but doesn't know how to build/handle 64-bit descriptors.  Same with BASIC's CLASS_D support.  The Pascal RTL has lots of 32-bit pointers that I'll expand to 64-bit pointers (we did the underlying work for our Tru64 product years ago).  Write any Pascal, COBOL, BASIC requests on the back of a $100 bill and send them to me. :)