30 Nov
2010
30 Nov
'10
3:08 p.m.
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 5:59 PM, <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote:
Dennis Boone [drb at msu.edu] wrote:
A story I heard in the mid-1980s was that the developers used every
supported language (even PASCAL and COBOL) to force marketing to leave
in the RTLs rather than sell them separately, but I've heard that
particular story debunked on this list.
Richard [legalize at xmission.com] wrote:
?> Was it written in predominantly one language? ?If so, which one?
The standing joke was that the development folks tried as
hard as they could to use every available translator or interpreter
in the os.
I thought it was meant to be the RTL? VMS/VAX was mostly MACRO-32 and BLISS although you can
find other
languages there too (e.g. PL/I for MONITOR iirc).
And I know I've seen C (for some tool that came out in the VMS 5.x
era, not originally) and COBOL and PASCAL. Probably FORTRAN, too,
but I couldn't tell you what tools were written in what languages this
far out. I do recall that I was surprised to see the messages
generated by the error log scrubber tool (forget the name at the
moment). It was one of the lesser-used languages, possibly PL/I (a
language I never personally did anything with, which is why it might
stick out in my memory).
All the fiche I ever read personally contained BLISS-32 and MACRO-32
code, but my readings were slanted towards system programming and
writing device drivers, not application code and utilities.
-ethan