[Info-vax] BASIC and AST routines

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/24/2021 1:34 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2021-11-24, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 11/24/2021 9:08 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>
>>> I suggested it was needed because clearly something needs to be manually
>>> preserved by the programmer in Macro-32 code that simply would not be
>>> an issue if VMS was based around an higher-level language instead.
>>
>> But it is an observable fact that it is not needed.
> 
> Turns out it's not the programmer who needs to preserve the registers
> but the OS and it turns out that VMS did it by pushing the registers
> directly into the user-visible call frame and hence making them directly
> available to the callback function. :-(
> 
> That is incredibly ugly. It should have been handled by either the
> compiler itself generating the required AST code sequence or the OS ABI
> saving the registers privately outside of the user-visible call frame
> before calling the AST.

So do we now agree that the Macro-32 thing was pure manure?

:-)

Arne