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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: except what, is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:41:39 -0000 (UTC)
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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.