Re: Calling Ada from C

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen, LJK Software)]

In article <EACHUS.95Mar27144807@spectre.mitre.org>, eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus) writes:

>    DEC made the decision to build the DEC Ada run-time into VMS, so
> that Ada programs do not pay a large penalty and can be freely mixed
> with other DEC supported languages.  They might have decided to do it
> otherwise had they no already integrated PL/I in the same way.

Not just PL/I, but Fortran, Dibol, Cobol, C, Pascal RPG and Basic have
this support "built in" for VMS systems.

Aside from common debugger support, however, the method in which these
are "built-in" uses only techniques which are also available to a third
party vendor to add a compiler of their own choice.  DEC will not take
care of distributing the "Run-Time Library" image to every VMS system
in the world, but that is easily countered by a vendor allowing those
who have the compiler to freely distributed the "Run-Time Library" image
along with the software they produce with that compiler.  In fact a
few years ago DEC authorized their own compiler customers to do that
as an additional distribution strategy for cases with version skew
issues.

Larry Kilgallen