[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 10/11/2021 2:25 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2021-10-09, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 10/9/2021 4:55 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> And here I was trying to explicitly not slag on RMS and its
>>> capabilities, as that'd solely serve provoke a torrent of folks quite
>>> reasonably pointing out that RMS is perfect for {app}.
> 
> Actually to those people I would say that RMS is pretty much perfect - for
> applications written in Macro-32 that require record-level access.
> 
> The RMS APIs perfectly match the huge level of work required in writing
> a full application in Macro-32 (that would be far easily written in a
> higher-level language) and perfectly matches Macro-32's utter inability
> to provide any meaningful abstraction layers in Macro-32 source code
> when compared to abstractions available in those same higher-level languages.
> 
> The RMS APIs are what you would have designed in the 1970s. They are not
> what you would design in this century.

The RMS API is centered around FAB and RAB blocks.

But that concept is not Macro-32 centric at all. They are just
records/structs. That is common in all procedural languages
including Pascal, C, Cobol etc..

In the last 30 years they would have been made classes with
private fields and public accessor methods (C++, Java, C# etc.).
But still basically the same concept.

I suspect that you are again talking about the fact
that address fields did not increase from 32 to 64 bit
when moving from VAX to Alpha.

But that is independent of the FAB/RAB block concept.

FAB/RAB blocks could have been changed back then. But DEC
decided not to.

Arne