[Info-vax] Listeners in VMS Basic, was: Re: Integrity iLO Configuration?

[abrsvc]

On Monday, July 12, 2021 at 4:51:35 PM UTC-4, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 7/12/2021 4:37 PM, Chris Townley wrote: 
> > When I joined out development team in 1997 (after years running an 
> > operational unit using the software) I stated that I was fine with a 
> > high level language, but I would refuse to use or learn macro -my only 
> > experience of a low level language was Z80, and I failed then,and did 
> > not want to go through that again. This was accepted. 
> > 
> > Only twice did I come across issues with the macro - the first time I 
> > got someone from the original software house to correct some language 
> > translation issue when we moved Germany onto Alpha - two of them spent 
> > about 4 hours and change two characters, which worked. 
> > 
> > Next time was during my IA64 port, where 2 bits of macro didn't work, so 
> > I recoded one in C, and one in Basic - both based on the function 
> > documentation. Both worked. 
> > 
> > Excepting low level stuff, why does anyone use macro?
> Possible reasons: 
> * old habbits 
> * code that is so old that when the it was original created every 
> byte and instruction mattered for end user performance 
> * the fact that Macro-32 was free and DEC compilers was 
> expensive 
> 
> Arne

Most of the macro code I have worked on over the last 20 years has been code was created many years ago and remained unchanged because it always worked.
Moving to Alpha required some simple changes for the most part, but some code required a little more effort.  These days, I usually can eliminate most of it.  I did write a short routine to convert data about 4 months ago that was easier in macro mostly due to the interpretation  of some data streams multiple ways.  Using bytes as unsigned in some cases and signed in others.  It was easier to use macro to "convert" those bytes into larger entities in macro.  Trust me on this as I can't divulge too much info about the site.

The bottom line is that there may be uses, but they are more rare as time goes on.