[TUHS] DEC compilers (was Happy birthday, John Backus!)

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Thu Dec 6 04:46:44 AEST 2018


On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 1:29 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/vax/ultrix-32/4.0_Jun90/AA-MG63B-TE_ULTRIX_Technical_Summary_Jun90.pdf
> seems to imply that as of Ultrix 4.0, there were COBOL and Ada compilers
> for the VAX (Table 4-1).  Elsewhere VAX LISP for Ultrix is mentioned, which
> I had no idea existed.  I hope that these compilers have been preserved
> somewhere, as I imagine they sold in relatively small quantities.
>
It all gets fuzzy by then - what was released and what actually existed.
 Their was a Vax LISP from the Franz guys, but I think the DEC/CMU Common
LISP was VMS also was there.     The 11 has been dropped from support an
the PMAX has replaced it but the compilers for PMAX are coming primarily
from MIPS.   I do not believe DEC did a LISP themselves for the MIPS
machines.  But, it turns out a number of the MIPS compilers would work on
Ultrix, although DEC had not released them directly.   But some 3rd parties
did on their own, sometimes with DEC's blessing and sometimes not.
 Plus the Alpha is being developed by then, so TLG is up to neck in the GEM
development cycle which would replace everything i the languages teams when
the dust settled (as Paul has mentioned it was an amazing piece of work at
the time and still somewhat lasts today - the VMS,Inc folks of course are
built an INTEL*64 code generator for it and supposedlty have VMS booting on
modern HW these days).

Clem
ᐧ
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