[Info-vax] VMS Basic and quad by value

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/24/2022 6:23 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> On Friday, September 23, 2022 at 4:37:44 PM UTC-4, Arne Vajhøj
> wrote:
>> I am not good at Basic so I may be missing something obvious.
>> 
>> As I read the manual then I should be able to pass a quad by
>> value.
>> 
>> But the compiler disagrees.
>> 
>> Can anybody shed some light on this?
> 
> I have written "a lot" of BASIC programs for VMS and OpenVMS systems
> since 1987 and published many demos here: 
> https://neilrieck.net/demo_vms_html/openvms_demo_index.html and have
> saved some recent BASIC manuals here: 
> https://neilrieck.net/misc/pdf/vms-docs/
> 
> IIRC, the QUAD data type was added to BASIC for the port from VAX to
> Alpha and it appears that it was not implemented fully or properly
> tested by Compaq. To make matters worse, many broken items were not
> fixed by HP for the port to Itanium. Some of the problems with
> BASIC-1.7 (see first link) were fixed by HP then sent to me as
> private patches but were never put into production for other
> customers. As I understand it, all my problems with the compiler and
> BASRTL have all been fixed in the VSI branded products so customers
> still working in the OpenVMS ecosystem need to move to VSI ASAP.

I am testing with VSI Basic 1.8.

I will just conclude that quad by value is not supported
for now.

Arne