[Info-vax] Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?, was: Re: LMF Licence Generator Code

[John Reagan]

On Monday, August 9, 2021 at 7:59:18 AM UTC-4, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 8/8/21 9:23 PM, Dave Froble wrote: 
> > On 8/8/2021 7:07 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote: 
> > 
> >> Not exactly true. While modern BASIC has c ome a long way it 
> >> will never escape its roots which were not in the IT Production 
> >> world. Like Pascal it was intended to teach concepts and, 
> >> believe it or not, one of those concepts was not programming 
> >> per se. 
> > 
> > Interesting statement. Coming from someone who admits to not being 
> > familiar with the language.
> Misunderstanding, again. What I am is not an expert in VMS BASIC. 
> I have used BASIC since the Kemeny/Kurtz days. I have done real 
> production work using BASIC on everything from Micros to Mainframes. 
> I have done business, financial and engineering programming in BASIC.
> > 
> > Perhaps older implementations of Basic were as described.
> I stated that modern BASIC had improved but that doesn't change the 
> original purpose. The idea of "fixing" these languages (like they 
> also tried with Pascal even after the original author of Pascal 
> gave them an alternative) is little more than a band-aid when you 
> consider there were/are languages designed to do the work people 
> try to do with these languages.

The backstory of Wirth's interaction with the Pascal Standards Committee is a long one. 
He wasn't very interested in standardizing/extended the base Pascal language definition.
That was ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1983 and ISO/IEC 7185.  The committees (a joint IEEE P770, 
ANSI X3J9, and ISO/TC97/SC5/WG2) created a new standard, Extended Pascal (ISO/IEC 10206 
in 1990), to both standardize existing practice among the various vendors plus add features 
to the language to make it a better tool for writing medium to large-scale projects.  DEC was 
very involved with this standard and I wrote several pieces of it.  VAX Pascal ended up with
many of the standard features but some had slightly different syntax.  The foreword to 
ISO/IEC 10206:1990 has lots of useful information.

John, secretary, X3J9/IEEE P770