[HECnet] SCSISE adapter -> listings

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- <system at tmesis.com> wrote:
  It was a question of why go out of ones
way to recode in C.

No idea, but the numbers did not lie.   The customers wanted C not BLISS and if you look at the number of customer projects that switched to it >>outside<< of DEC, it was not even close.

I learned BLISS/10 and BLISS/11 (and eventually BLISS/32) at CMU on the 10s before I learned C.   When I first saw C (the white book had not yet been written) and I was not not assumed, particularly since the BLISS macro processor and code generator were so far advanced from dmr's compiler.    But I quickly learned that I >>preferred<< C for a number of reasons.   Originally, because it was self-hosting which BLISS was not for the PDP-11 and my edit/compile/test cycle was just so much easier.

That said for early VMS editions, when there was not C, all we had was BLISS, so I used it; but I also used to grumble as I had been enlightened from the dark side.   I can definitely state that Stan and I had had Culter's VAX11-C when wrote the TCP stack we would have use it not BLISS - but it was all we had and his compiler was a good 3-4 years into the future.

Late on Larry and I used to talk about this at lunch.    I think most of the system folks in the VMS group that really learned C, eventually came to the same spot as I did.    It was just an easier echo system to use; but they key was that were not trying to use BLISS I/O, we used C calls once we switch over - which may have been what make you think that it's support was not as good.


That said, the compiler guys (Grove at al), doggedly stayed with BLISS to the end.    Rich and I have also talked about the issue, including the "what if GEM has been in C not BLISS" - would Intel have been able to accept it as the base?    An interesting thought [instead the DEC DNA is ground up and reinjected].

Clem