[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 10/16/21 10:25 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 10/15/2021 10:45 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Saturday, October 16, 2021 at 10:03:36 AM UTC+13, Stephen Hoffman
>> wrote:
>>> Linux shimulation is not going to speed the delivery of the
>>> OpenVMS x86-64 semi-production and production versions, nor the
>>> availability of native compilers.
>>
>> If VMS compatibility for user-mode code just takes the form of a
>> library to link against, then VMS-specific compilers shouldn’t be
>> necessary. You could use the existing GNU and LLVM compilers, and
>> just implement wrappers that understand the VMS-specific options.
> 
> The most important word in that sentence is "If".
> 
> Because that assumption is not valid at all.
> 
> VMS C and C++ has some VMS specific language extensions.
> 
> VMS Fortran and Cobol has a lot of VMS specific language extensions.

As a very strong advocate of the continued use of COBOL (I fought
to keep it in academia just as hard as I fought to keep VMS there!)
I find this interesting.  Does anyone have a relatively large VMS
COBOL program that has these extensions in it that they can and
would be willing to share?  I would love to take a look at just
how hard it would be to get it to compile under the current COBOL
standard.

bill