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

[Dave Froble]

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. :)
>

I too wonder about "reasonable versions" when talking about Basic?

It's 32 bit.  So what, it just works.

Maybe not on the $100 bill, but, unsigned integers would be a nice 
touch.  But I've lived without them for 45 years, so no big problem.

Doing away with that procedure of scanning the stack when returning from 
a routine would be a nice performance improvement.  Being a believer in 
modular code, I got lots of library routines for many things.

Not sure what the issue is with the quadword datatype that surfaced 
recently.  Should not happen.

-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc.      E-Mail: davef at tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA  15486