[TUHS] Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?

On 6/12/23, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: I don't think this remark was intended to denigrate Fortran in any way. I took it as a wryly humorous way to make the observation that C and Fortran have different program startup semantics, and that there is other stuff that has to be done when firing up a program written wholly or partially in Fortran beyond what is needed to start up a C application. Most operating system ABIs, Unix included, don't have a formalized mechanism for dealing with the differences between startup semantics of various programming languages. They deal with the problem in an ad-hack fashion. The one exception that I know of is VMS (now OpenVMS). Tom Hastings was the architect who designed the original VAX/VMS ABI. He was aware from the get-go that several programming languages had to be supported and he made sure that his design was general enough to allow programmers to write routines in the most suitable language for them, to mix and match modules written in different languages in the same program, and to easily make calls from one language to another. It was a stroke of genius and I haven't seen its like in any other OS (several times I've wished it was there, though). Further discussion in COFF. -Paul W.