🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1aubqgINNbhn@gap.caltech.edu>,
carl@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick) writes a very snide and insulting
flame challenging those who criticize the VMS method of shareable image version
checking to come up a method of solving the backwards-incompatibility checking
problem without using shareable image version numbers.

Here is one approach that solves the problem.  First, you do away with
transfer vectors and instead bind the references to routines in a shareable
image at run-time (this is in fact the way that Alpha AXP OpenVMS does it).
Second, you do away with the shareable image version ID and replace it with a
separate version ID for each entry point.  That way, a program that doesn't
use any of the new stuff in a shareable image can still run against an older
version of the shareable image.  The only cases where you get the backwards
compatiblity problem is where you are actually calling routines that have
backwards compatibility problems.

--PSW