[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 1/29/22 19:26, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> =?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?

And in Ratfor in the STVOS.

> 
> 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.

Isn't it time to drop this red herring.  C was not the only and
probably not the first to use null terminated strings.  If anyone
really cared it could have been fixed ages ago (it actually was
in Safe C and we see how much acceptance that got!!)

bill