VAX MACRO is the computer assembly language implementing the VAX instruction set architecture for the OpenVMS operating system, originally released by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...

(DEC) in 1977. The syntax, directives, macro language, and lexical substitution operators of VAX MACRO formerly appeared in MACRO-11, the assembler for the

PDP-11 The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were so ...

series of computers. The ''MACRO-32'' assembler supported the VAX processors developed and manufactured by DEC. It ran under the VMS

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

and produced object files suitable for the VMS

linker Linker or linkers may refer to: Computing * Linker (computing), a computer program that takes one or more object files generated by a compiler or generated by an assembler and links them with libraries, generating an executable program or shar ...

. The MACRO-32 assembler and linker were bundled with the operating system. To port VMS to the

DEC Alpha Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ...

, 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 In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

, 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 compiler from MACRO-32 is available for Intel

Itanium Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance comp ...

architecture, and for

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

References

External links

VSI OpenVMS VAX MACRO and Instruction Set Reference ManualVSI OpenVMS MACRO Compiler Porting and User's Guide
{{Digital Equipment Corporation Assembly languages OpenVMS OpenVMS software Digital Equipment Corporation