Re: except what, is Vax addressing sane today

On Sun, 22 Sep 2024 09:14:04 -0700, Lars Poulsen wrote:

From a programmer's perspective, VAX exception handling was very nice.
It may have been high overhead, though.

Very high overhead. But it was also language-independent, and integrated
into the procedure-calling convention, which also managed to be language-
independent.

There is an internal memo on Bitsavers somewhere, critiquing a proposal to
adopt the MIPS architecture (which DEC did, for just one machine, the
DECstation 3000 if I recall rightly), and one of the points against MIPS
was that it didn’t have language-independent exception handling. But then
no other architecture, before the VAX or since, has been able to do that.