Re: except what, is Vax addressing sane today

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:41:39 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

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),

Much more than one machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation
4 ranges, 13 models.

DEC was quite successful both with MIPS and with x86.
I'd guess, their CPU designers didn't like it.

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.