1748112 Members
3342 Online
108758 Solutions
New Discussion

HP BASIC & $XABFHCDEF

 
SOLVED
Go to solution
Hein van den Heuvel
Honored Contributor

Re: HP BASIC & $XABFHCDEF

In C, there are several predefined macros to help with coding in situations like this.


No there are not... read on.

>>> in this shop if I could in Basic distinguish between Alpha and Itanium,

No you should not.

>> I could have $XABDEFFHC included conditionally.

You should be able to include is unconditionally.

There is an XABDEFFHC on for the version of OpenVMS since 7.3-X / DECbasic 1.3 on Alpha, as well as on Itanium.

If there is not one om the particular Alpha system which is being used then is is 99.99% certain to be non-standard, out-of-date library and placed there explicitly.

You can do the exact same thing on Itanium. That would not be a bad thing to do. No worse then the Alpha situation today. There is NO platform dependencies in XAB(FHC)DEF for Alpha/Itanium. They are exactly the same, both conforming to the RMS defitions which are the same.

>> The following two-line program compiles fine on our Itanium; but fails to compile on our Alpha.

The operative word is *our*.
It will work on any other Alpha.

Best regards,
Hein van den Heuvel

Garry Fruth
Trusted Contributor

Re: HP BASIC & $XABFHCDEF

Just adding a bit more information in case someone runs into a similar situation. The installation kit prompts the user whether or not to create the 'system definitions'. The default is NO. Consequently, if you install the new versions of the compiler, and select the default, you get to keep the old definitions.

I'm not sure if this option is shown when installing on a VMS 8.3 machine; where BASIC$STARLET is distributed with OpenVMS.

Somewhere along the line, some coding changes needed to be made with the compiler upgrade.