[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Chris Townley]

On 28/01/2022 23:36, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 1/28/22 15:30, Chris Townley wrote:
>> On 28/01/2022 19:22, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-01-28, Chris Townley <news at cct-net.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 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...
>>>>
>>>
>>> I actually do know _lots_ of assembly languages. My opinions are based
>>> on knowledge, not ignorance.
>>>
>>> A sample of assembly languages I have either used in the past or are 
>>> using
>>> these days for specialist things: Macro-11, Macro-32, Alpha, x86, ARM,
>>> MIPS, and the odd 8/16 bit little MCUs.
>>>
>>> Everything I use assembly language for these days is for specialist
>>> reasons (ie: bare metal startup, bare metal interrupt handlers, getting
>>> access to specialist hardware registers from a program, etc) and I 
>>> switch
>>> to at least C as soon as possible.
>>>
>>> Simon.
>>>
>>
>> Simon, I was not deriding anybody who does write this level of code - 
>> I did a small amount of Z80 assembler in the 80s, but do not want to 
>> go back there. I am an application programmer, so for me there should 
>> be no need for assembly programming!
>>
>>
> 
> That's funny...  I did a lot of applications programming in Assembler
> back in the day.  PDP-11, Z80, M68K.  Did systems stuff later on but
> I started as an Applications Programmer/Systems Analyst and while I
> did a lot of COBOL, Fortran and Pascal often Assembler was needed
> because of the limited resources of the machines.
> 
> bill
>
But I only joined the programming team in the late 90s, and had moved to 
alpha. Performance was rarely an issue.

Where it was was nothing to do with using a high level language - for 
example I found a purge program on a large file that took nearly 3 
hours. It read the whole file sequentially, with a lock, to delete about 
10% of the records. I changed it to read without a lock, only getting a 
lock if we needed to delete. Dropped to 10 or 15 minutes. No assembly 
coded needed

-- 
Chris