[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Scott Dorsey]

=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 1/29/2022 2:53 PM, John Dallman wrote:
>>>
>>> It is a language from the era when all programming was assumed to be 
>>> hard,
>>> requiring detailed design documents, and painstaking specification of
>>> every data structure. This was entirely appropriate for a time when a
>>> mainframe's memory was measured in small numbers of megabytes. However,
>>> the hardware has changed. Packing data into every spare bit is rarely
>>> worthwhile. Using some of the computer's resources to make programming
>>> easier is usually desirable. Bliss is certainly better than assembler,
>>> but it assumes resources are scarce.

Bliss is in these ways similar to HP's SPL/3000 "systems programming language"
and a fair choice for writing a kernel but not for writing the code that
the kernel runs.  And as you mention, the syntax is not obvious and more
modern designs may make errors like misplaced endings much less of a problem.

>And it is not just me.
>
>The rust people are rewriting GNU Coreutils (C) in
>rust.
>
>https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Rust-Coreutils-Jan-2022

Didn't we already do that in Pascal back in the days of the Software Tools
In Pascal project?

Pascal is pretty limited but makes it hard to shoot yourself in the foot.
And most implementations don't use null-terminated strings which are the
most serious source of vulnerabilities in C code.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."