[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[John Reagan]

On Monday, January 31, 2022 at 3:25:10 AM UTC-5, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2022-01-31 01:22, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> > On 2022-01-29, Scott Dorsey <klu... at panix.com> wrote: 
> >> 
> >> 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 
> >> 
> > 
> > I wouldn't call Pascal "limited". DEC used it to implement VAXELN...
> The problem is that the ISO standard for Pascal is pretty useless. Which 
> is why every useful Pascal have extensions... 
> And they are all different... 
> Which makes everything very non-standard... 
> 
> But Pascal is definitely not that bad a language. But it has it's warts... 
> 
> Johnny
There are two Pascal standards.  ISO 7185 is the traditional Wirth language
with the addition of conformant arrays.  Then there is ISO 10206 "Extended  Pascal"
which was the follow-on.  The committee (I was the secretary) didn't want to just
keep revising (changing) the base standard like you see today with C, C++, Fortran,
etc.  Due to some politics, we went with a totally separate standard.  Looking back, that
was a bad decision.

EP does attempt to standardize many of the concepts like a MODULE syntax, run-time
sized types, etc.  While the syntax might be slightly different, you can see may of the
VMS Pascal features in the standard.

Of course, it isn't a real standard if nobody implements it.  That's what happened in the
BASIC eco-system.  I'd say VMS Pascal does about 50% of the actual features and syntax
of EP; 25% of the features but with our older syntax; 25% yet to be implement.    Over all,
Extended Pascal is quite good at medium-to-large applications.  

We also have an appendix/technical report on adding object-oriented features on top of
Extended Pascal.  [To my knowledge, nobody ever implemented it.]