[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Chris Townley]

On 28/01/2022 15:31, chris wrote:
> On 01/28/22 00:57, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 1/27/2022 5:21 PM, VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
>>> In article <ssurv4$nm1$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley
>>> <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>>>> On 2022-01-27, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>>> On 1/27/2022 11:25 AM, John Reagan wrote:
>>>>>> On Thursday, January 27, 2022 at 3:39:38 AM UTC-5, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>>>>> Why C, when there are better languages?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If you are about to use the B-word, better is relative.
>>>>>
>>>>> Obviously.
>>>>>
>>>>> But not everybody is in love with C.
>>>>>
>>>>> Personally I consider C a fine language for OS kernel development
>>>>> but not so great a language for more regular applications. And
>>>>> DIR is really an application.
>>>>>
>>>>> I am not good at VMS Basic, so I would prefer VMS Pascal.
>>>>>
>>>>> :-)
>>>>
>>>> Pascal is acceptable, but Ada would be better. :-)
>>>>
>>>> On a more serious note, what would be an acceptable programming 
>>>> language
>>>> for userland tools which need to be shipped as part of the operating
>>>> system ?
>>>>
>>>> Let's look at the language options for creating a new userland level
>>>> tool on VMS today:
>>>>
>>>> Macro-32 and BLISS are absolutely unsuitable for obvious reasons.
>>>
>>> What *obvious* reasons?
>>
>> Not cost efficient.
>>
>> There is a reason why assembler programming is becoming so rare
>> as it is.
>>
>> Arne
>>
>>
> 
> Difficulty in maintenance, or even finding programmers fluent enough
> to get the best results. If C can be a minefield for the unwary, then
> you really are on your own with assembler and need to know a lot more
> about the underlying machine architecture, os implementation and
> more. Asembler only makes sense now for the lowest level system
> programming, where there is not enough machine state to support a
> high level language...
> 
> Chris
> 

I agree wholeheartedly. When I joined our programming team, I stated 
that I would not learn Macro. When porting to Itanium, 3 modules of 
Macro didn't work, so I rewrote them: 1 in Basic, 2 in C. All was good!

Luckily they were well documented...

Chris

-- 
Chris