[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 10/12/21 1:29 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yea, why would anyone ever need more than 32bits of addressable
data.  :-)

bill