[Info-vax] VMS internals design, was: Re: BASIC and AST routines

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-11-29, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>
> I agree with the sentiment here, but this is not something that has 
> anything to do with VMS.
>
> This is a choice that was done by the people writing the language 
> runtime system. For some reason they thought it was a good idea to 
> expose these internal things explicitly in the language. I would not do 
> it, and it seems you wouldn't either.
>
> But why are you blaming that on VMS?
>

In addition to the comments posted by Stephen, VMS has what is called
the Common Language Environment, which all DEC compilers must comply
with. The CLE is a standard which sets down rules to allow modules
written in different programming languages to interact with each other.

As another example of how VMS controls the compilers, VMS also supplies
the Structure Definition Language files and the SDL compiler to generate
the language-specific VMS headers from the VMS supplied SDL files. These
VMS-specific headers are not manually created by the compiler teams.

For these reasons, I have always regarded this kind of thing as being
a part of VMS itself and not just something done by the compiler teams.
The compiler teams do not have a free hand here and have always been
driven by standards and processes laid down by VMS engineering.

Simon.

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