[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Dennis Boone]

 >    I didn't see anyone claim it did.  I also didn't see anyone claim C
 >    did.  I just don't see the logic in choosing it when a simple data
 >    structure seems to work better.  Even PASCAL seemed to choose a
 >    less intensive approach.

Probably a combination of motivations existed.  Keep in mind that
the Bell Labs folks promoted storage and use of data in text formats,
wrote books like Software Tools, and tried to avoid arbitrary limits.
They considered string scanning loops with continuation tests of *p
to be fairly straightforward to understand.  And the instruction
sets of the machines they were using included deferred addressing
and pre/post increment, making the compiler translation easy.

Yes, experience has proven that it's easy to make mistakes with
this particular knife, that it's hard to train programmers to work
carefully, etc.  And ASCII ain't what it used to be.  But experience
and unicode didn't exist then.

De