[Info-vax] General Availability of 9.2 for x86-64

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <taro7p$329ob$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>On 2022-07-14, VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG <VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote:
>> In article <memo.20220714171951.11788A at jgd.cix.co.uk>, jgd at cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:
>>>Announced today:
>>><https://vmssoftware.com/about/news/2022-07-14-openvms-v92-for-x86-announc
>>>ed/>
>>>
>>>"VSI is also planning on making OpenVMS V9.2 available to hobbyists as
>>>soon as more native compilers are available." 
>>
>> Macro32 is all that's needed.  Don't forget a native assembler too.
>>
>
>:-)
>
>And back in normal-land, everyone is using C, COBOL, Fortran, etc and
>don't give a damn about Macro-32 compilers. :-)

Long before you crawled out from under the unix slime, internals programs
on VMS were written using Macro32 and Bliss.  There was a discipline that
made it easy to do so and Macro32 was a very high level assembly language.
Its assembler has a MACRO facility, unlike your beloved C launguage's pre-
processor string substitution, that allows coding reusable macro routines
that can accept an argument or three or more.  It's not a powerful as the
Bliss compiler's macro facility but still pretty competent.

There are hundreds of thousands of lines of Macro32 in just the code that
I maintain for several third-party applications.  In this day and age, it
is highly doubtful that the companies which own these products would pay
me to recode it all in your beloved C language and then, go through all of
the effort to verify that the rewritten code still performs like the old.
I think there was another company that put forth that same argument.  If
ONLY I could only DECant its name from my vast recollection. 

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.