[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 2/3/22 09:21, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-02-02, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2/2/22 13:21, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-02-01, Paul Hardy <p.g.hardy at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>>> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>>>>    ?
>>>>> Fortran and COBOL are not suitable for writing operating system userland tools.
>>>>
>>>> Not that I would encourage it as an implementation language these days, but
>>>> Fortran has been used as such in the past. I believe the Fortran H Extended
>>>> optimising compiler for the IBM 360/370 was written largely  in Fortran H
>>>> Extended.
>>>>
>>>
>>> You are correct about past use. In the context of the discussion,
>>> I meant they are not suitable for writing userland tools _today_
>>
>> Why?  Just because there are other languages doesn't obsolete their
>> use for the task.  If that were true we never needed anything after
>> C was created.   After all the first Open Source compilers for many
>> of the languages in use were just x-to-C translators.  P2C, F2C,
>> heck even GNAT was originally just an Ada to C translator.  And some
>> are still that way and work just fine. GnuCOBOL for example.
>>
> 
> Because C has turned out to be a better choice than Fortran for
> writing userland tools so you would choose C (at a minimum) for
> writing such tools today.

In what way?  :-)  There are a lot of people in the industry today
that feel that C isn't a good choice for anything.

> 
>>> and I gave an example of where I had seen Fortran used in the
>>> distant past while I was still in school and before before C got
>>> established outside of Unix.
>>
>> Ind I have seen Fortran used for this stuff long after C escaped
>> into the wild.  There really is no legitimate reason why languages
>> Pascal, Modula, Fortran, PL/I, or anything else is unsuitable as
>> long as it is available on the system and there is a programmer
>> willing to work with it.  After all, in the nd it's all just ones
>> and zeroes.
>>
> 
> Pascal and the Modula variants offer far more than C. Fortran does not
> when it comes to implementing userland tools.

Same question.  In what way?  I have already shown how Fortran was
used to write an entire userland for the first "POSIX" interface.
41 primitives and 50 utilities.

bill