[Info-vax] OS implementation languages

[John Dallman]

In article <mddbkeuq2ya.fsf at panix5.panix.com>,
news at alderson.users.panix.com (Rich Alderson) wrote:

> Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
> > Most companies that went that way early was way less successful 
> > than DEC, so it is kindof strange to claim that DEC did it wrong 
> > and they did it right...
> 
> Many of the companies which did this were competing in the 
> mainframe universe (the Seven Dwarfs, later consolidated 
> into the BUNCH) against the number 1 company in that universe.

And IBM was re-writing its mainframe operating systems in the PL/S
derivative of PL/I <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PL/S> in the early
1970s. That is still used to maintain them. 

> The companies in the minicomputer universe who did this were also 
> competing against the number 1 company in THAT universe.

However, DEC's "High-Level Language" for systems programming was BLISS,
which is a lot closer to the machine and less portable than PL/S or C.
DEC had plenty of good ideas for fixing this in the 1980s and early 1990s,
but they all got cancelled until Alpha. That ended up using C for a lot
of the additions to VMS, and the rise of PCs and RISC platforms meant DEC
was already in deep trouble by then. 

John