SCO UNIX <REPLACES> VMS and ULTRIX on new DEC product line

[Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR]

As quoted from <1990Dec28.022041.20793 at mtxinu.COM> by shore at mtxinu.COM (Melinda Shore):
+---------------
| In article <18859 at rpp386.cactus.org> jfh at rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes:
| >BLISS is best
| >known for its use of "." in address notation.  Just ask a BLISS-bigot
| >to justify putting that "." in front of a variable name, then stand
| >clear ;-)
| 
| I hardly qualify as a BLISS bigot, but I really don't see that
| .FOO is any odder than *foo or foo^, eh?
+---------------

What's odd about it is that it's required by *every* variable.  (For those
who've never been exposed to BLISS:  you don't declare variables, you declare
addresses.  "." is the dereference operator.  So to use a variable, you must
*always* use the dot to specify you mean the variable and not its address.
This behavior is great for writing OS kernels, device drivers, etc., but is a
bit baroque for application programs.  I don't remember any other oddities;
the extent of my exposure to BLISS was a manual for BLISS-10 that I borrowed
for a few days some 9 years ago.  It didn't interest me enough to follow up,
especially after comparing the horrendous number of JSYSes in TOPS-20 to the
number of system calls in Xenix 2.3a, which I had just discovered.)

++Brandon
-- 
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