12 Jul
2024
12 Jul
'24
11:02 p.m.
On Fri, 12 Jul 2024, Paul Winalski wrote:
Oh, no wonder the translator worked so well.
Macros were
used very extensively in VAX MACRO, both for user programming
and in the operating
system. All of the low-level system calls for user
programs were implemented and documented as macros. The OS assembly code
made heavy use of macros as well. Outside the VAX/VMS development group, BLISS was
DEC's standard
implementation language. In the development organizations I worked in
(software development tools and compilers), we did almost zero programming
in assembly code. ...
When I was at Yale we did a fair amount of programming in BLISS-36 which
was a pretty nice language once you wrapped your brain around some of its
quirks like needing a dot for every memory reference.
Our Vaxes ran Unix so it was all C other than a few things like tracking
down a bug in the 11/750's microcode that broke an instruction in the
inner loop of printf(). I had managed to get a cross-compiling
environment working an a PDP-11 but Bill Joy found the bug at the same
time so we used his patched version.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(a)taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
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