[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 1/31/22 08:42, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-01-31, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) <helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de> wrote:
>> In article <ssurv4$nm1$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley
>> <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>>
>>> Fortran and COBOL are not suitable for writing operating system userland
>>> tools.
>>
>> Why not?
>>
> 
> For the same reason that OS designers moved from Fortran to C as the
> system implementation language when C became available. C is simply
> a better language than Fortran for those kinds of tasks.

All of the userland in STVOS are implemented quite nicely in Fortran.
(Well, Ratfor actually, but then the Fortran compiler makes them
functional.)

> 
> As for COBOL, I invite you to try implementing something like CDU or
> especially TPU in it. :-)

In one of it's earlier incantations Micro Focus did their COBOL
compiler in COBOL and that was with a version that did not even
support recursion.

Go look at some of the things that have been done in COBOL and Fortran
for Rosetta Code and then try to argue that these languages lack the
abilities of other languages.

bill