[Info-vax] Which programming language would you like to see officially supported on VMS ?

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2021-01-03 kl. 01:41, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
> 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
> 

Correct. Our core applications are Cobol and we use Python for
some support scripts in batch and the web server processes. It is
a perfect combination...