[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/2/2022 1:41 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-02-01, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>> On 2022-02-01 19:28, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-02-01, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>> On 2/1/2022 9:01 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>> On 2022-01-31, Dave Froble <davef 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.

The idea of an OS mostly written in a HLL is not invented by Unix.

But I agree that they made the right decision.

> 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.

I believe that assembler has always been supported on Unix.

With the traditional Unix C tool chain of compiler driver calling
preprocessor, actual compiler, assembler and loader then it  is
not even possible to compile on a system without the assembler.

And null terminated strings are not harder to do in assembler
than descriptor strings.

> 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

I believe a good chunk of VMS was not written in Macro-32 but in Bliss.

In hindsight C would have been better than Bliss.

In hindsight more Bliss/C and less Macro-32 would have been good.

But 20/20 hindsight is easy.

Arne