[Info-vax] VMS Software Q1 '23 Update

[John Reagan]

On Wednesday, January 25, 2023 at 1:14:40 PM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2023-01-25, Arne Vajhøj <ar... at vajhoej.dk> wrote: 
> > 
> > Given a lot of VMS users are using Basic, then I don't think 
> > it is being down prioritized for business reasons. That does not 
> > make sense. 
> >
> John has mentioned that he's hit problems due to some unique requirement 
> in DEC Basic. I wonder if the problems were more serious than he 
> initially realised ? 
> 
> Simon. 
> 
> PS: I wonder what they finally ended up doing about TECO ? :-) 
> 
> PPS: On a more serious note, I wonder how the Rdb users feel about 
> Rdb not been available for x86-64 for at least another year ?
> -- 
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
> Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

I wrote that sentence in the PDF file.  Vadim is less optimistic.  We'll see who is right.
Depends on how often they change the water in my "head in a jar".

As I've said before, the issue is COMMON blocks.  When I first did the design of
how to convert GEM CIL and GEM symbol table to LLVM, I didn't appreciate the
difference in how COMMON blocks are described to LLVM and the UNIX environment
in general.  It isn't just BASIC, you can see broken COMMON blocks in the Fortran
cross-compiler if you look hard enough.  The problem is that the BASIC MAP statement
doesn't work right and almost every BASIC program uses MAPs for something.  I have
a BASIC cross-compiler.  If you don't use a MAP, it probably works (although the test
system doesn't very far without MAP).

I also didn't appreciate the complexity of how BASIC uses (exploits?) the GEM interfaces.
We already found one place where it relied on the GEM implementation in spite of the
GEM documentation saying "don't do that".    We extended the G2L converter to emulate
the GEM behavior about positioning of variables on the stack.

I'm actually code reviewing (well, I haven't started reviewing yet) a solution from one
of my engineers.  It fixes the Fortran issues.  I hope it will help BASIC but I haven't 
looked.  We'll keep pounding on it.