Re: MI as the MI language of the as400.

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To: mi400@midrange.com
From: jamesl@hb.quik.com
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Reply-To: jamesl@hb.quik.com
Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 17:04:44 EDT
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Subject: Re: [MI400] MI as the MI language of the as400.

Fellow MI geeks:

Of course, there's a language I know and love, though I've
only had one
opportunity to use it in the 17 years since I got my BS, that
allows
fine-grained control over an awful lot of things, and has things
built into it
that would be system calls in any other language. It also has
pointers, but
manages to avoid giving you enough rope to hang yourself and
every other user
on the system. It also has intelligently chosen defaults
for practically
everything you can control. In fact, it's so intelligent,
it's the closest I've
ever been to a language where the source code for any
program consists of the
single statement, "YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT; JUST DO
IT."

You may have heard of it. It's called PL/I. And as lousy and
narrowly-subsetted
as AS/400 PL/I was, there was much wailing and gnashing
of teeth when Rochester
decided to drop
it.

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JHHL