[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[abrsvc]

On Wednesday, February 2, 2022 at 1:41:08 PM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-02-01, Johnny Billquist <b... at softjar.se> wrote: 
> > On 2022-02-01 19:28, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> >> On 2022-02-01, Dave Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote: 
> >>> On 2/1/2022 9:01 AM, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> >>>> On 2022-01-31, Dave Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote: 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> Don't people ever wonder what DEC people were thinking when they wrote VMS? 
> >>>>> 
> >>>> 
> >>>> Yes, I do. Then I remember it was written in the 1970s. :-) :-) 
> >>> 
> >>> What does that have to do with anything? 
> >>> 
> >> 
> >> What makes some things about VMS so limiting in the 21st century is 
> >> as a direct result of it being designed in the 1970s instead of it 
> >> being designed around more modern techniques and concepts. 
> >> 
> >> I believe I may have expressed some opinions in this area previously. :-) 
> > 
> > This kind of argument always have the same problem that Unix is even 
> > older. Does that mean Unix have an even larger problem? 
> > 
> > Or is this in fact not a factor in there? 
> >
> No. It means that the Unix creators were _very_ insightful and _very_ 
> forward looking in the early 1970s when they rewrote Unix, including 
> the kernel, in a mostly portable language that mostly decoupled the 
> implementation from the architecture it ran on, while most other people 
> still wrote their kernels, and maybe good portions of their userland 
> as well, in assembly language. 
> 
> They were also very insightful in that the minimum application programming 
> language they supported was also C. These factors laid the groundwork 
> for the future use of Unix across a large range of architectures and 
> was directly responsible for its rise to the position it gained. 
> 
> They were a good 10 years earlier with these moves than when these ideas 
> started to become mainstream. 
> 
> DEC OTOH, took the traditional approach for the time and wrote their VMS 
> kernel in an assembly language that was directly tied to the architecture 
> and also allowed assembly language to be used as an application programming 
> language, which directly impacted how the VMS APIs were designed.
> Simon. 
> 
> -- 
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
> Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.
You realize that both the VAX and VMS were collaborative projects such that there were architectural elements to make VMS work better right?
VAX had queue instructions for this reason for example.

MACRO 32 was not "designed" to be an application language any more than IBMs assembly was even though both platforms had applications entirely written in their respective assembly languages.