[Info-vax] VMS Software needs to port VAX DIBOL to OpenVMS X86 platform

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/26/2020 5:52 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2020-12-23, John Reagan <xyzzy1959 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, December 23, 2020 at 1:54:02 PM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> expectations and the current market for operating systems. And VSI
>>> doesn't have MICA source code, and anybody that does have that source
>>> code is unlikely to share it.
>>
>> Please no.  Somebody will ask me for a PILLAR compiler (which was derived from the EPASCAL compiler - compare the PILLAR and EPASCAL manuals)
> 
> I've read the Pillar manual and I liked it.
> 
> It had a lot of good things in it and if it had been implemented during
> the 1980s it would have been a _very_ viable alternative to the C
> language that existed at the time.
> 
> If it got established, it could have changed computing history and today
> we could now have had a viable, and established, Pascal-like alternative
> to C when writing operating systems and other low-level code, with
> everything that would imply for system security.

Maybe.

But there were languages with Pascal syntax to chose from.

Modula-2, Ada 83 etc..

> Given that the Pillar manual was never officially released but sort-of
> "leaked", I wonder if anyone would get into trouble (copyrights, etc)
> if they implemented Pillar using, for example, LLVM ?

Re-implementing from functional specification has traditional been
considered OK.

It may change a bit depending on the outcome of Oracle vs Google
(but even in that case Oracle said that it was OK for language and
the runtime parts closely related to the language).

Any implementer should probably give it a different name
to avoid any IP problems with name.

Arne