[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 1/31/22 14:35, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-01-31, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.)
>>
> 
> Was that before or after C became established in general use ?
> 

Paper was published in September 1980 CACM.  Can't say when C spread
throughout the world but I can tell you by 1980 it ran on every
system I worked on except the Terak.  :-)

And, it's irrelevant anyway. Your comment was that Fortran was
unsuitable and the fact that all of the userland and all of the
primitives needed to make this possible were, in fact, written
in Fortran.

bill