Re: Quality of VAX compilers

On Wed, 07 Jun 2006 20:18:28 -0700, John Fredrickson <jafred@verizon.net>
wrote:


> Peter,
>
> I don't know much about the internals of the VAX compilers other than
> they were all optimizing compilers that subscribed to the same calling
> standard, enforced by the VMS operating system and the one
> linker. That's why you could develop multiple modules of a software
> system in multiple languages (VAX-BASIC, VAX-FOTRAN, VAX-COBOL, etc)
> and link the object modules together into a single EXE file.


It goes a bit further. They developed a tool SDL, Structure Definition
Language, which allow for data declarations in a language independent
manner. By specifying the desired target language an include would be
generated in that language, However, unlike Prime, DG or Wang, there
was no common backend except for PL/I, C, Pascal and Pearl.


> The VAX hardware and VMS Operating System were designed together and
> were a beautiful system. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) did a
> good job transitioning to Alpha and OpenVMS.


I think you will get some argument on that, the Alpha instruction set
left a lot to be desired, which is one reason a lot of the VAX objecrs
were 'VEST'ed

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