[Info-vax] Which programming language would you like to see officially supported on VMS ?
Arne Vajhøj
arne at vajhoej.dk
Sat Jan 2 19:41:25 EST 2021
On 1/2/2021 6:49 PM, Dirk Munk wrote:
> Mumps was mentioned. I know it was / is used in hospitals etc. , and VMS
> was very strong in hospitals. Seems logical to me to provide a mumps
> compiler then.
There are vendors to work with for MUMPS/M.
> Pascal is bit problematic. Pascal was never meant for production, it was
> a language meant for education. But just as with Unix and C, it
> 'escaped' from the schools and universities to production. Mr. Wirth,
> the designer of Pascal was not at all pleased with that. He designed the
> Modula language for production. It has the Pascal syntax, just as the
> other offspring of Pascal, Ada. So, is Pascal still being used on VMS?
Based on discussions here and in the VSI forum, then yes it seems
that VMS Pascal is used.
It is worth noting that VMS Pascal has some useful extensions:
* module concept
* good support index-sequential files
* etc.
In many ways VMS Pascal is the most modern of the traditional
VMS languages (not counting C++, Java etc. as traditional).
> Ada is a language for very reliable applications, I have always been
> told. Seems to me as a typical VMS language.
How much Ada is done for the market that VMS is targetting?
My impression is that Ada use has declined since DoD dropped
Ada requirement and that of the remaining Ada use a large part
is for "critical thingies" not regular business servers.
> Other languages? There are more than 11,000 ...... A new language
> should fit in the VMS environment. I'm sure you can make any script
> language run on VMS, but does it add something, apart from "look, we can
> do that too"? It should add to the functionality of VMS, just having it
> as something that has no real connection to VMS is not useful in my
> opinion. Why should you write a script language application on VMS, if
> you can do it on Linux or Windows as well? What does VMS add for such an
> application?
If you need a server to *only* run Python or PHP or whatever, then
VMS is not an obvious choice.
But a lot of script usage is not for the core application but for
supporting applications. On VMS then your can have your core
application in Cobol/Fortran/Pascal/Basic/C/Macro-32 and then
you write some supporting applications in Python or PHP. And
those supporting application may either need to be on the same
system as the core application or it is just cost efficient to
run them on the same system as the core application.
Arne
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