Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nbires!hao!noao!arizona!lm
From: lm@arizona.edu (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <4080@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 88 03:47:09 GMT
References: <1636@tulum.UUCP> <20268@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: lm@megaron.arizona.edu (Larry McVoy)
Organization: University of Arizona, Tucson
Lines: 21

In article <20268@bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>Unix is the premiere system for compute intensive areas, such as the
>sciences using Fortran. The reason is the vast range of power a
>program written to run under Unix presents. As I said, a program
>developed on a small, affordable PC or workstation can be copied and
>re-run on huge compute engines. Although a lot of the sciences in the
>past used VMS they now generally realize that this was an error and

I agree with the rest of the article but this part is not completely
true.  VMS fortran is the de facto industry standard.  Until I can have
all the VMS extensions (and there are a lot of very useful ones) this
argument does not hold water.  Sorry, Barry, but we can't misrepresent
the facts.  And maybe Ultrix supports them (I don't know) but that's 
not enough - your argument said from the PC to the super computer
(super computer companies take the VMS extensions _very_ seriously).

I really feel sort of gross sticking up for VMS but this is one place
that it shines, and fair is fair.
-- 

Larry McVoy	lm@arizona.edu or ...!{uwvax,sun}!arizona.edu!lm