[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-10-12, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> On 10/11/2021 2:25 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> 
>> 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..
>

There's a slight difference in the available level of abstractions
in those languages compared to Macro-32. :-)

> 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.
>

Concept and implementation are two different things.

> 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.
>

But not of how they are implemented. No other operating system needs
to support assembly language as an application programming language.
In those operating systems, assembly language is only used for some
rare special cases in an application normally written in a higher-level
language.

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

And now we are paying the technical debt for that decision.

BTW, I wonder, with the required changes for the new filesystems
for disks >2TB, if VSI will still support Macro-32 with the new
filesystems or if we are moving to data structures with abstracted
pointer sizes (and subroutine interfaces) just as in Unix and elsewhere.

Simon.

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