Seems it was because I couldn’t figure out about needing to define output in 
the program line
Turbo pascal doesn’t use that

I’m going to test some simpler code I have and see if I can get it going and go 
from there

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________________________________
From: Simh <[email protected]> on behalf of Gary Lee Phillips 
<[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, February 8, 2018 8:19:20 AM
To: Tim Shoppa
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Simh] anyone know how to convert/translate turbo pascal to vax 
pascal?

It could, but the error message should make that clear. If the compiler rejects 
the syntax that's a different message from a linkage error.

I wrote working system code in VAX Pascal but it was back in the 80s. Some of 
my work was accepted for publication in fact. I also did some substantial work 
in Turbo Pascal at about that time. But to be honest, I haven't touched Pascal 
for years now. Even so, I do know that VMS Pascal will support the language 
standards just as it always did. The problem with writeln is likely to be 
non-standard syntax, as Turbo Pascal accepted a lot of short cuts. I suspect 
the big issues with the project in question are more likely going to be related 
to graphics.

--Gary


On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 7:10 AM, Tim Shoppa 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Could the writeln issue, be a link time and not compile time? I remember having 
to specify the Pascal runtime libraries (more than one?) at link time.

Tim

> On Feb 8, 2018, at 7:51 AM, Gary Lee Phillips 
> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> VMS Pascal conforms to the language standards. So does Turbo Pascal, if the 
> code is written to standard.
>
> The problem with porting in Pascal comes when language extensions are used. 
> These are often proprietary and/or hardware specific. On OpenVMS much of the 
> extended capability depends on calling system libraries, all of which are 
> supported. Turbo Pascal was designed specifically for the IBM PC and 
> "compatible" systems, and contains a lot of proprietary extensions that will 
> not be recognized by VMS Pascal's compiler.
>
> If your code depends on graphic functions, the ones in Turbo Pascal are 
> almost entirely peculiar to that environment and will require a lot of 
> rewriting. These use custom libraries that come with the compiler, and 
> probably most can be duplicated by using OpenVMS system calls in some format. 
> Some analysis will be required to identify the hardware specific code and 
> select appropriate substitutions.
>
> As for "free pascal" there are several incompatible implementations that go 
> by the name, so I'm not sure what you have used. However, all of them pretty 
> much support the original language definition and code that stays within that 
> standard definition will work without translation. Extensions that use 
> library calls or custom units are going to be the area that requires 
> (possibly a lot of) work.
>
> The full VMS Pascal manuals are available in PDF form online and you should 
> begin there.
>
> By the way, VMS Pascal definitely supports writeln. It also has record 
> structures, etc. Those are all part of the standard language definition. We'd 
> need to see a sample of your code that doesn't work in order to figure out 
> where your problem comes from.
>
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