[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Rich Alderson]

jgd at cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:

> In article <29ad12ab-b1a7-4a44-b1fa-3d12812cf603n at googlegroups.com>,
> xyzzy1959 at gmail.com (John Reagan) wrote:
> > On Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 2:15:48 PM UTC-5, Simon Clubley 
> > > You can write a full-blown parser in Macro-32 if you really want 
> > > to. It doesn't mean that any sane person would want to do that when 
> > > there are better languages available. :-)
> > Well, the Macro-32 parser is written in Macro-32.
> 
> That sounds as if someone got carried away by the power of the VAX
> instruction set, as compared with previous instruction sets they'd used. 
> 
> John 

The PDP-10 macro assembler (Macro-10, Macro-20) is written in itself, and is
still in use as an intermediate step by the PDP-10 C compiler.  Given that the
base code is 55 years old, and performs its job entirely adequately for modern
software development *in C*, why rewrite it (which by definition will introduce
new bugs)?

I suspect that the writer(s) of Macro-32 were familiar with the internals of
Macro-10...

-- 
Rich Alderson					  news at alderson.users.panix.com
      Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
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									--Galen