[Info-vax] For sale: VAXstation 4000/90 128MB Fully Working and Tested

[John Reagan]

On Thursday, June 30, 2022 at 9:58:17 AM UTC-4, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 6/29/2022 10:01 PM, Dave Froble wrote: 

> > VSI is currently supporting VMS, and porting it to x86 ... 
> > VSI is currently (I hope John) supporting Basic ... 
> > The auditing firm is a bunch of crooks ...
> There are some reasons for concerns: 
> - niche OS (VMS) 
> - niche language (VMS Basic) 
> - obsolete language (Macro-32) 
> - probably non-optimal persistence technology (RMS index-sequential 
> files aka NoSQL Key Value Store) 
> - the team getting close to retirement 
> 
> But it is not an urgent problem: 
> - all the software is supported and can be expected to be 
> supported for many years 
> - the team has not retired yet 
> 
> What you need is a roadmap showing a long term viable future. 
>
OpenVMS has other niche languages as well.  Our Pascal full of extensions (many
from the Extended Pascal standard but available nowhere else so they might as well
be considered vendor-specific).  Some vendors have attempted to convert Pascal to
C but it looks ugly (IMHO).

Yes Dave, BASIC is still on the schedule.  As mentioned, BASIC exposed a missing piece
of the G2L design and the solution is complex.  While my model has been "don't touch the
frontends and make G2L look just like GEM", the best way out might involve changes to the
BASIC frontend.

I would never recommend BASIC inside the OS.  It is too heavily dependent on its RTL to
implement certain language features.  I suppose you could limit the set of features to allow
but that would be a big investment to isolate all of those.  However, there are not enough
additional language features to make it a benefit.  

There was a study decades about about using Pascal inside of OpenVMS much like how 
EPASCAL is used inside of VAXELN.  Pascal lost even though it had much more type
safety.  Although a distant project for a "virtual VAX" was written in VAX Pascal.  They weren't
happy to find out VAX Pascal used the HALT instruction to signal run-time errors. 

As for retirement, I have no short term plans to retire.  What would I do?  Just sit around all
day on comp.os.vms and complain?  ;)

And I did send in my DNA to 23AndMe so my DNA has been sequenced and is on a computer
somewhere.  All you need is to wait for the human 3d printer to be developed.  I've also looked
into putting my head in a jar https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Heads_in_Jars