what was VMS/OpenVMS written in?

[Zane H. Healy]

At 3:57 PM -0700 11/30/10, Richard wrote:
>In article <20101130225024.C3751A580D3 at yagi.h-net.msu.edu>,
>     Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> writes:
>
>>   > Was it written in predominantly one language?  If so, which one?
>>
>>  The standing joke was that the development folks tried as hard as they
>>  could to use every available translator or interpreter in the os.
>
>So *not* predominantly written in C?

Only in recent years has C been used that much.  One place you're 
likely to find a lot of C would be in DECwindows.  As has been noted 
MACRO-32 and BLISS-32 were two of the main languages used initially.

I tend to suspect there is a lot of truth to the 'standing joke'. 
People write tools, others find them useful, they get added to the 
OS.  They weren't always even DEC/Compaq/HP people that wrote them.

I've personally done quite a bit of Perl programming for VMS. 
Definitely not the normal language to use, but it's for my systems, 
and I like Perl.  I've also written other stuff in Ada, DCL, and 
BASIC.

Having lots of languages to choose from is a good thing in my 
opinion.  I'm reminded of iOS development, where as near as I can 
tell we're limited to Objective-C if writing a native app.

Zane



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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
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