[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[bill]

On 1/5/2024 1:17 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/5/2024 1:01 PM, bill wrote:
>> On 1/5/2024 9:08 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 1/4/2024 11:44 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 03:09:37 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>>>> I think, again, you are talking at cross-purposes: my suspicion is 
>>>>> that
>>>>> Arne is referring to a VMS compatibility layer built on top of Linux,
>>>>> not the effort of porting VMS to x86_64.
>>>>
>>>> I thought I made it pretty clear early on that I was only talking about
>>>> porting across userland executables and DCL command procedures--just 
>>>> the
>>>> parts of VMS that users care about, nothing more.
>>>
>>> If the goal is 90% compatibility, then it is reasonable easy and
>>> low cost. But no customer demand.
>>>
>>> If the goal is 100% compatibility, then it becomes tricky and expensive.
>>>
>>> There will be both some hard problems and a gazillion trivial problems
>>> to deal with.
>>>
>>> Let me be specific. It is not difficult creating functions named
>>> LIB$GETJPI and SYS$GETJPIW accepting certain argument. But what are
>>> they going to return when asked for an item that does not exist
>>> on Linux?
>>>
>>
>> What would they return if asked for an item that does not exist on VMS?
> 
> SS$_BADPARAM I believe.
> 
> But returning that for items codes working on VMS could
> easily break code.
> 

Times change.  Sometimes code needs to as well.  :-)

bill