[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/31/2022 7:46 AM, John Reagan wrote:
> 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...

> 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.]

Object Pascal sort of became industry standard in that regard.

Arne