[Info-vax] How much of VMS is still in MACRO-32?

[John Dallman]

In article <acaada5c-fa6f-4715-bdf2-c7170bc03462n at googlegroups.com>,
xyzzy1959 at gmail.com (John Reagan) wrote:

> All the Macro compilers (Alpha, Itanium, and x86) have 64-bit 
> builtins beyond the VAX instruction set.  However, changing a 
> field or argument involves touching every single instruction 
> that involves it as the size is part of the instruction.

Make sense. 

> Widening arguments can be a little tricky, but all those string 
> descriptors, itemlists, and RMS data structures have 32-bit 
> pointers in them.  Yes, there are some 64-bit flavors
> of itemlists and descriptors and even some RMS data structures (but 
> even RAB64 didn't widen ALL of the pointers) but switching involves 
> touching lots of code again.

Got it, thanks. 

John