[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/31/2022 4:10 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <61f81e10$0$706$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
> =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?= <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
> 
>> But Fortran 77 to 90 was more than the typical version change. I think
>> it could have justified a name change.
> 
> Considering that essentially all of Fortran 77 works in Fortran 90, then
> a name change would be bad.

Fortran 77 code build with Fortran 90 compilers, but how Fortran 90 was
intended to be written is very different from Fortran 77, and a lot
of Fortran 77 features were declared obsolete and to be removed
in a future version (and some were actually removed in 95, other are
still waiting to be axed).

>                               I've heard about other new, popular
> languages which don't respect backward compatibility.  :-)

Not so common.

Some accidental stuff when the keywords in new features collide with
user identifier in old code. A lot of Java developers had used 'enum'
as identifier before Java 5 in 2004.

Some old RTL functionality being removed. Classic is PHP
removal of mysql extension in PHP 7.

Real language breaking changes are rare.

Python division from 2.x to 3.x may be the best known example.

C# 7 to 8 non-nullable reference types was a big change but it
could be turned on/off at compilation.

Arne