VAX MACRO
VAX MACRO is the computer assembly language implementing the VAX instruction set architecture for the OpenVMS operating system, originally released by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1977.
| Paradigms | non-structured, imperative |
|---|---|
| Family | assembly language |
| Developer | Digital Equipment Corporation |
| First appeared | 1977 |
| Typing discipline | Untyped |
| Scope | Lexical |
| Implementation language | assembly language |
| Platform | VAX |
| OS | VMS |
| Influenced by | |
| MACRO-11 | |
| Influenced | |
| MACRO-64 | |
The syntax, directives, macro language, and lexical substitution operators of VAX MACRO formerly appeared in MACRO-11, the assembler for the PDP-11 series of computers. The MACRO-32 assembler supported the VAX processors developed and manufactured by DEC. It ran under the VMS operating system and produced object files suitable for the VMS linker. The MACRO-32 assembler and linker were bundled with the operating system.
To port VMS to the DEC Alpha, VAX MACRO was implemented for the Alpha architecture. Since the Alpha used a different instruction set than the VAX, MACRO-32 was implemented as a compiler, compiling VAX assembly language into Alpha instructions.
The Alpha AXP chips have their own native instruction set architecture, the OpenVMS assembler for Alpha assembly code is named MACRO-64.
A MACRO-32 compiler is also available for the Intel Itanium architecture, and for x86-64.