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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 6/7/2019 3:30 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> 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. :)
For languages where there are no new standard like Pascal and Basic
or language where demand for the new standard is practical
non-existing like Cobol then it is obviously not new
standards that will drive the development of the languages.

But if we look a bit out in the future like VMS 10.x or 11.x, then
I would think that:
* the VMS API's are due for a major overhaul
* the new API's will likely be object-oriented

So then adding OO to Pascal and Basic becomes relevant.

We know that it can be done, because other have OO'ified
those languages.

Arne