[Info-vax] VMS internals design, was: Re: BASIC and AST routines

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/2/2021 3:43 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 12/2/2021 3:14 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 12/2/2021 11:36 AM, John Reagan wrote:
>>> You can suppress that run-time check (and other heavy-handed BASIC 
>>> features) with
>>>
>>> OPTION INACTIVE=SETUP
>>>
>>> In the routine.
>>
>> But Basic is correct - there are too many arguments
>> supplied (or too few arguments expected).
>>
>> It much be better to fix that than to disable the check.
> 
> You going to advocate "fixing" that "lack of argument count check" in C 
> and other languages too?

I would not advocate changing C, but I would advocate not using
C unless one really needs the low level features.

C is a great language for code that 40 years ago would have been
written in Macro-32. It is a poor language for code that 40 years
ago would have been written in Pascal, Ada or Basic.

Unfortunately the dominance of C API's for native code are often
forcing the usage of C.

Arne