Text File

Aucbvax.5927 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Sat Jan 23 09:18:46 1982 portability of bliss >From Kim.fateman@Berkeley Sat Jan 23 09:15:33 1982 (I know this is off the subject somewhat, but the bliss code in VMS that I have seen is highly non-portable, typically using VMS assembler without apologies. Fortran tends to produce portable programs only when you use it as a high-level assembler. Floating point computations are rarely absolutely portable (i.e. same answers, behavior). Retrofitting to pdp-11's is not a consideration at Berkeley, anyway.

It is obviously a 2-way street about installing device drivers vs. editing source code. The system manager of a VMS installation CANNOT edit the source code, because he/she doesn't have a copy! If one wants to avoid editing UNIX source to install a change, what can be distributed is a "make" file which installs changes in the source code, recompiles, etc. UNIX has convenient tools for this. To make a virtue of inaccessible source code in the community reading this mailing list, seems difficult. On the other hand, DEC may be right in keeping VMS source hard to get. Who wants to answer questions from random people hacking (perhaps inscrutable?) code? Who wants to lose the unique competitive advantage of a reasonable Fortran 77 compiler, by giving out source? VMS is a commercial creature, for good and ill. I think many people use VMS over UNIX for excellent reasons. Some use VMS for poor reasons. I suspect that for many people, it really doesn't matter very much WHAT they use. One VAX/UNIX system at Berkeley runs a Fortran/Pascal/C batch-stream, in background, for example.

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.