Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 9/26/24 11:10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:42:32 +0100, Pancho wrote:
 

... a bitch to work out how to call Vax C from Vax Pascal, or
vice versa.

 Why would it be that hard? VAX C passed everything by value, while Pascal
let you specify descriptors, references, immediate value ... all the
options.

There ware decisions to be made, like what order do you push variables onto the stack, when do you push the return address, how to interpret a Pascal String in C. 40 years on I can't remember what the problems were, just that it took a lot of trial and error.
Some of this might be obvious now, some not obvious. Even things like the Pascal string data structure were not obvious to me then, possibly not even mandated in the Pascal Language spec. Now I would guess at string length being the initial two bytes, back then it was all new to me.