[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-02-03, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/3/22 09:21, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
>

There's a reason I keep referring to C as the _minimum_ acceptable
option, not the maximum acceptable option. :-)

As for those people, they need to find a language that is implemented
as widely as C is, so that implementing something in that other language
becomes an asset and not a liability.

If I had my way, everything would be written in Ada, but unfortunately,
that's not a viable option in today's world.

>> 
>> 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.
>

In the case of Pascal and the Modula variants, that's easy.
Both of those options have strong type-safe and data manipulation
attributes and end up producing more robust code in general.

BTW, sort-of related to this, does anyone else wish C was a module
based language ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.