[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <n7qpc59nt71k5l26uic8khj8q84h07cdno at 4ax.com>, jls <notvalid at yahoo.com> writes:
>> How it worked before the memory mapping was rearranged must have been
>> a complete "happy accident".  The bug was in that code from day 1 but
>> had somehow never surfaced before it was recompiled to take advantage
>> of improvements in a new version of the Fortran compiler.
> 
>    Prior to adding pointers to Fortran, it was always possible to catch
>    this sort of thing by adding checks at compile time (at least on good
>    compilers).  Adding pointers may have made this difficult at times,
>    but I haven't seen any big pointer users writing Fortran.
> 

Us old folks who never had them never missed them! Of course Fortran 
USED pointers but you couldn't access them.  There were exceptions; e.g. 
users who managed to compute negative subscripts without corresponding 
array declarations. . . .