[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <00A9285E.A191C0B4 at sendspamhere.org>,
	VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG writes:
> In article <7irif8F31nq9iU12 at mid.individual.net>, Bob Eager <rde42 at spamcop.net> writes:
>>On Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:17:17 +0000, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>
>>>> Macro is an assembly language on steroids.  Bliss is an assembly
>>>> language on steroids.  C needs Altoids, not steroids, because it
>>>> stinks.  It doesn't even have a decent macro capability.
>>> 
>>> Because C came from the Unix environment and putting the Macro
>>> Pre-preocessor in the compiler would have violated the paradigm Unix was
>>> based on.  Thus, "cpp" and, of course, M4 as separate programs.
>>
>>It was also necessary for space reasons. The amount of address space 
>>available on a PDP-11 with non-separate I/D space was only 64K. Of that, 
>>8K (one page register) was set aside (AFAIR) for system communication, 
>>leaving 56K for programs.
>>
>>c0 (the preprocessor) handled macros and includes. c1 was the compiler, 
>>which generated dreadful code as there was no space for the code 
>>generator to do optimisation. c2 was the optimiser, which did a lot of 
>>clever stuff. I think c1 was the limiting factor, needing pretty well all 
>>the available address space for program, and data structures.
>>
>>Just took a look - c1 was 15K, c1 was 21K, and c2 was 8K (approx). That's 
>>just code and static data. c1 would need a lot of dynamically allocated 
>>storage for symbol tables, parse trees, etc.
> 
> If you haven't taken notice, C isn't being used these days for PDP-11
> programming.
 
Which, of course, doesn't change the Unix paradigm.  Although GNU is
trying very hard to break even that.  Of course, when MS puts everything,
including the kitchen sink, in a single program it is called bloatware
and when GNU does it, it is called progress. 


bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>