[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]
I found another comp.lag.pop posting on google groups that somehow did
not make it to the Birmingham site.
> From: William Barnett-Lewis (wlewis@mailbag.com)
> Subject: POP on VAX/VMS
> Date: 2001-12-06 12:21:14 PST
>
> Hello,
>
> Before I start, I was wondering if anyone has successfully built Pop
> on a VAX/VMS system anytime recently? And also which of the files on
> the ftp site are necessary to download for this to succeed?
>
> While I'm more than comfortable building something like this in Unix
> or Windows, I am still very new to VMS so I'm left wondering from the
> state of the FAQ and documentation if a VMS build is still possible.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> William
I don't know if anyone is still using VAX VMS poplog.
Although I copied over the source directory for Vax/VMS from Sussex
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/S.vaxvms/
there are no binaries in the pop/ subdirectory, presumably because the
developers at Sussex did not have them.
It's possible, though unlikely that one of the old customers of ISL (now
SPSS) still has a running version.
In that case the only hope would be to start from another running
version (e.g. linux or solaris poplog), then, using that, compile
the sources in the S.vaxvms version (I could provide a tar file)
and go through the compiling and rebuilding process described in
the files in here
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/sysdoc/
The ppg document describes the overall porting process. The bulk
of the coding for VMS has already been done and can be found
in this directory
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/S.vaxvms/src/
which is mostly common to all the systems, apart from these VAX
assembler files
aarith.s
aextern.s
afloat.s
alisp.s
amain.s
amisc.s
amove.s
aprocess.s
aprolog.s
asignals.s
and some of the files in the syscomp subdirectory, which are system
specific:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/S.vaxvms/src/syscomp/
So assuming that vax assembler is unchanged and no alterations are
required to any of the vax system calls, that process will create large
number of assembler files which can be copied over to a VAX, then
assembled there, linked and run - if you are lucky.
Once you have an executable, it can be used as the basis of all further
development work. I don't know whether any additional work will be
required on any of the X window system files.
If the existing VMS poplog sources are all OK then depending on the
speeds of the machines you have available and your familiarity with
complex system building the time scales could be
1. A day or two to read and take in the documentation in the
above sysdoc directory (also in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/sysdoc.tar.gz
74927 bytes
2. Download and install either solaris or pc+linux poplog
on a suitable machine. After downloading, installing should
take at most a few minutes.
3. Spend some hours playing with the system and reading some of the
REF documentation referred to in the sysdoc files
4. Ask me to make a tar.gz file with the VAX VMS system sources and
fetch it onto your machine.
5. Use the running poplog to compile the sources. That may take
minutes or hours depending on the speed of the machine.
6. copy over all the old and newly generated VMS assembler files.
7. assemble link and check that you have an executable. If not
try to fix the sources appropriately.
8. When you have an executable copy over the vax/vms directory
tree, into a directory called pop, put the executable in the
pop/pop sub-directory, and follow instructions for rebuilding.
This could all take a few days or a few weeks, depending on how up to
date our VAX system sources are and how clear the documentation turns
out to be for you.
Depending how much your time is worth it may be a lot cheaper to buy a
PC with linux and run poplog on that (and it will probably run very much
faster too), but I guess you have some strong reason to want to use the
Vax.
Vax/Vms was the first environment on which poplog was built in anything
like its present form (by John Gibson) after the inital baby pop-11
system was transferred from the DEC PDP11 unix system on which it was
originally developed, all in hand-coded unix assembler, by Steve Hardy.
Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/ (And free book on Philosophy of AI)
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
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