Posts by jreagan

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

I first learned Pascal on the CDC 6000s at Purdue in the early 1980s and later went on to be on the Pascal Standard Committee and the project leader for the DEC VAX Pascal compiler. I'm still in charge of it (and others) for OpenVMS on the x86 platform. So that early Digital Pascal V2 compiler from 1982 is doing quite well today, 42 years later.

While the committee didn't have any interactions with Prof Wirth, we did go on to do a significant upgrade and created Extended Pascal in 1989 (the politics of the ISO and IEEE organizations pushed us towards a separate language, not a Pascal revision).

I had a listing of the ETH compiler in my archives but I donated it to a collector several years ago. I didn't scan/photograph it before I got rid of it.

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

SQRL

Personally, I prefer Steve Gibson's SQRL solution which is also password-less and seems better than FIDO to me.

www.grc.com/sqrl

VMS will be ready to run on x86 in 2019!

Re: Not quite

The layout is somewhat different. On Alpha, the PAL code knows about the OpenVMS PTEs (page table entries) and provides the 4-modes of protection. On x86-64 (in long mode), the PTEs only have 2-modes of protection. We'll emulate the other two in the OS with shuffling around page table entries for super/exec modes.

VSI licensed the OS and the layered products. They should be there. It will be native on the hardware.

There is a Macro-32 compiler that will turn your VAX Macro-32 assembly code into target code. We have one for Alpha and Itanium. We are working on one for x86-64.

Re: Not quite

Not true. The hardware only has two modes. It is the PAL code that creates the illusion of 4 modes. If you load the Tru64 PAL code on Alpha, you only get two modes.