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

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-01-02, Dirk Munk <munk at home.nl> wrote:
>
> 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?
>

VAXELN was written in a variant of Pascal.

The Modula variants are effectively dead, while Pascal still has multiple
active compiler options across a range of operating systems.

> Ada is a language for very reliable applications, I have always been 
> told. Seems to me as a typical VMS language.
>

Yes it is. Unfortunately, no Ada compiler currently exists, or is likely
to exist, for x86-64 VMS.

> 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?
>

Some of those scripting languages (assuming they come with an added VMS
integration module) are a _far_ better choice for tying together VMS
applications than DCL is.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.