Re: PL/I

["R. Bruce Hoffman, Jr." <rbruceh@xxxxxxx>]

Colin Williams wrote:
> 
> Many people seem to mention how good PL/I is/was.
> 
> If so, what happened to it (It was before my time)?

No. Not before your time. It exists on every platform (even the 400),
but on the 400 it is not a full LP. It is not ILE on the 400 either.

How good is/was it? Consider that Synon used it to build their entire
product.

The language is unique. It came about as an offshoot from SHARE. The
language doesn't give a rip about what support the hardware provides.
Everything is supported in the code and may or may not be optimized for
the particular platform. Hence the floating support even when the S/38
did not have floating processors. The language can do stream or record
IO, string manipulations, had pointers and dynamic memory allocation,
strong control structure support, etc...

It was the Swiss Army Knife of languages.

C is a scalpel.

C++ is a double edged razor blade, you can cut some fine detail, but you
are going to cut yourself in the process.


-- 
===========================================================
R. Bruce Hoffman, Jr.
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional System Administrator
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional Network Administrator

"The sum of all human knowledge is a fixed constant.
    It's the population that keeps growing!"
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