[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Craig A. Berry]

On 7/31/20 4:05 PM, David Jones wrote:
> On Friday, July 31, 2020 at 3:32:40 PM UTC-4, Craig A. Berry wrote:
>> That's part of the equation, certainly. But if you call execv from a
>> program compiled with /POINTER_SIZE=64=ARGV, how do you hand off an
>> array of 64-bit pointers in argv to a program that may expect an array
>> of 32-bit pointers or may expect an array of 64-bit pointers?
> 
> If the header files have the proper prototypes, the compile will flag the calls
> with pointer mismatch warnings.

So say you have a program with a 64-bit argv array and it invokes
various other programs via execv(). What happens when the main()
function of one of those programs expects a 32-bit argv array and it
gets your 64-bit array?

Now maybe the whole command line is flattened into a single string,
reparsed by DCL, and passed to the invoked program.  That would be
horrible, but it would avoid the problem of mismatched argv pointer sizes.