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From: ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Porting Turbo Pascal programs to VMS
Message-ID: <1990Aug26.202358.3188@uwasa.fi>
Date: 26 Aug 90 20:23:58 GMT
References: <9090@ur-cc.UUCP>
Organization: University of Vaasa
Lines: 38

In article <9090@ur-cc.UUCP> elmo@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Eric Cabot) writes:
>  Does anyone out there have any experience porting Turbo Pascal Programs
>to VMS Pascal.  Although I swore that I'd never program in VMS, I decided

I've done some (well quite some) work with both, and unfortunately
you are in for big problems if you have used Turbo Pascal's special
features as you most certainly will have. 

>  For example, is there a VMS-Pascal equivalent to gotoxy?  I'm willing
>to rewrite my programs to *SOME* extent but there's no way that I'm going
>to redraw the entire screen just to put a single character, or move the
>cursor, into the middle of the display. 

You'll have to link to the VMS runtime library (RTL) which in some
ways resembles using interrupts.  It is an art by itself, and the
RTL documentation takes hundreds of pages.  The only nice feature of
it is that it is rather language independent.  (I've used the same
routines for fortran, basic, and pascal.)

>   I'm also pretty disappointed with the string handling, not to
>mention dealing with I/O to files. I know that VMS's implementation
>is closer to standard than Borland's but that's no excuse. The standards

Don't be.  VMS Pascal I/O and string handling are much more
convenient than the standard, and in this aspect VSM Pascal is
perhaps closer to TP than ANSI.  Try Unix Pascal, and see what these
useless standards of the purists really mean for serious utility
program writing.  For the proponents these standards often are a
holy end by themselves, never mind how hard it makes the real
programming work.  VMS Pascal is not as bad as that.

In summary.  Don't try to port your code.  Take your TP program's
logic, and then rewrite the whole thing. 

...................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi        (Moderating at anon. ftp site 128.214.12.3)
School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland
Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: gado::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun