[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[P. Sture]

In article <aWlo0bAMpgI7 at eisner.encompasserve.org>,
 koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) wrote:

> In article <7ij0ueF30a3ujU4 at mid.individual.net>, Bob Eager 
> <rde42 at spamcop.net> writes:
> > 
> > I think that's inevitable when the major language in use is C. That's a 
> > design issue; I was thinking more of how well the code was (not) written.
> 
>    Which makes you wonder why the inventors of C settled on such a design 
>    in a day when CPUs were so much slower.  If I had a system slower
>    than a PDP-11/70, I'd have wanted it to spend it's time doing better
>    things.

We came across that with PDP COBOL and early versions of VAX-COBOL, 
which didn't support global variables (it was an ANSII thing IIRC - 
lowest common denominator).  It wasn't too bad copying data areas to and 
from global sections on a VAX via MOVC3 (?) but it wasn't too clever on 
PDPs.  We heaved a sigh of relief when we managed to drop PDP support 
for those libraries.

-- 
Paul Sture