[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 2/3/22 13:43, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.

There are reasons why Ada didn't become the success story people
originally thought it would.

> 
>>>
>>> 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.

Fortran is just as strongly typed.  And what isn't robust about code
compiled from Fortran?

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

Why did you take both of these conversations back to C?
In both of the above segments we were talking about the supposed
unsuitability of Fortran for writing userland applications.

bill