Fixing a 41 year old bug in the SWTOOLS VOS SEDIT commmand on VAX/VMS 5.5-2
So, at work I maintain a VAX running VMS 5.5-2. That version of VMS was released in 1991... I've recently been using the Unix-like tools in the LBL Software Tools Virtual Operating System from the DECUS Languages & Tools tape from 1986. The SWTOOLS VOS is a portable reimplementation of many Unix style programs and library routines, inspired by Kernighan and Plauger's Software Tools books, writen in a Ratfor, a preprocessor that added structured control structures and other niceties to pre-1977 Fortran.
I use sed frequently on Unix, and unfortunately the SWTOOLS VOS equivalent, sedit, always exits with a fatal integer overflow error whenever you try to do anything. Today I took the time to figure out what was going wrong. It was, in the end, a two line fix. More information on my blog:
Fixing a 41 year old bug in the SWTOOLS VOS SEDIT commmand
It was fun figuring this out.
2024-07-15 · 2 years ago · 👍 drh3xx, BBSman
2 Comments ↓
👽 TKurtBond [OP] · 2024-07-16 at 02:08:
One thing I forgot to mention: The Software Tools need a Fortran compiler, but the VAX I maintain for work doesn’t have one, and since it is a work computer I can’t install one since you can’t get commercial licenses for software for VAX/VMS any more. So I compiled everything on another emulated VAX running on SIMH, did the debugging there, and moved the resulting fixed executable to the work VAX to use there.
🐙 norayr [mod] · 2024-07-19 at 21:46:
(: