One reason VAX Fortran was so popular is because DEC often
included it in quotes for Vaxes. If you were writing software
in a high-level language on VMS back then, writing it in Fortran
was a good bet since almost all Vaxes running VMS had Vax Fortran.
It took a while before the VAX C compiler was good enough, and
even then, it wasn't cheap. I was in the VMS development group
at Sybase in the early 1990s and we often hit issues in VAX C,
and in the VAX Debug support for it.
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Jon Forrest