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From: Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:49:37 +0100
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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.