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

[John F Haugh II]

In article <29029 at usc> annala at neuro.usc.edu (A J Annala) writes:
>My friends tell me most of VMS is coded in a DEC proprietary language
>called BLISS.  BLISS exists for PDP-11's, PDP-10's, and VAXen -- DEC
>could have chosen to write a new BLISS compiler for the 80386 -- but
>that is not what happened -- instead, DEC adopted SCO UNIX for their
>new machine.  Moreover, in the process, DEC abandoned it's own ULTRIX 
>(DEC proprietary version of UNIX) in order to adopt SCO UNIX.

BLISS is not proprietary.  If I remember from my languages survey
course (the one where I was supposed to write a paper on the origins
of BLISS ...), it was originally developed at CMU.  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 ;-)

Furthemore, there is no one "BLISS".  My recollection of BLISS is
that you get one for each platform - BLISS-36, BLISS-11, etc.  I
don't know what the difference is as I only played with BLISS on
the VAX briefly.

As for VMS, it is written, for the most part, in VAX assembler.
The utilities are written in a combination of languages, including
FORTRAN, BLISS, Pascal, and some are probably still in PDP-11
assembler running in compatibility mode.  You can find out the
language of your favorite program by getting it to abort somehow
and staring at the stack traceback messages.  Back when I was
abusing VMS machines (about v2.x) you could type a ^Z at almost
any program unexpectedly and it would barf for you.  You might
have better luck dumping the .EXE files and seeing what you can
find.  It's been quite a few years, so your milage may vary ...

I was told several years ago that some people were actually
starting to write parts of VMS in C (!).
-- 
John F. Haugh II                             UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
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