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.
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