[Info-vax] Python for OpenVMS VAX

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Chris Allen wrote:
> On Oct 13, 3:23 pm, sapienzaf <sapie... at noesys.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 13, 5:43 pm, Chris Allen <ca.al... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Unfortunantly I can't move to Alpha or Itanium,
>>> otherwise I would have already.
>> May I ask why not?  Is it a cost issue, management inertia, or
>> something else?
>>
>> If you have the source code then I would think porting becomes a very
>> good option.
> 
> There's a few reasons.  We run quite a bit of legacy software that was
> written by an employee who is deceased.  It might be a snap to port
> his software to Alpha or IA64 but we don't know.  His programs run
> great, and haven't needed any modifications in years.  Also we run a
> very ancient source code control tool called CCC (this predates CCC
> Harvest), for which we only have a VAX binary of.  My goal as a system
> manager here is to get off of CCC entirely, so not being able to run
> CCC on the new machine won't be a problem if I can migrate the code
> out of it into say Mercurial.  Now that I'm thinking about it it might
> not be a big deal to move to Alpha or IA64.

VMS to Alpha is generally not a difficult port.  About the only 
potential problem that I can recall is a program that has a dependency 
on the size of a "page" of memory.  I don't recall the details but VAX 
pages are 512 bytes and Alpha pages are bigger; I don't recall how 
*much* bigger.  Alright, one more potential problem!  If you are doing 
bit twiddling in floating point variables, the format differs between 
VAX and Alpha.

Most programs are compile, link, and go.