[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[John Dallman]

In article <61fdd1ac$0$705$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>, arne at vajhoej.dk
(Arne Vajhøj) wrote:
> On 2/3/2022 9:15 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> > About the only time you would see assembly language in application
> > programs is as tiny inline fragments called from a HLL if you 
> > needed direct access to a specific specialist CPU register (for
> > example) and then you (and not the OS) are responsible for that
> > assembly language.
> I think that is getting extremely rare today.

It is. I've had to do it in exception handler testing code, where a
processor had (and used) two separate sets of floating-point registers,
and thus two ways of generating floating-point divide by zero. The
compiler didn't let you specify which registers to use, so inline
assembler was needed. 

Since few programs enable floating-point traps on that platform at all,
doing this might be considered excessive diligence, but it meant we were
sure of what we were doing. 

John