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From: Charles H Sauer <sauer@technologists.com>
To: coff@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [COFF] Joys of PL/I [Was: Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation]
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 13:40:12 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ffcc6191-38b9-7b78-3ca6-df3a3546e6cc@technologists.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <e0f821bf-3bef-67e1-dca2-338180a5f156@gmail.com>

On 11/16/2021 12:54 PM, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
> On 2021-11-16 09:57, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>> The following remark stirred old memories. Apologies for straying off
>> the path of TUHS.

>>> I have gotten the impression that [PL/I] was a language that was 
>>> beloved by no one.
>> As I was a designer of PL/I, an implementer of EPL (the preliminary
>> PL/I compiler used to build Multics), and author of the first PL/I
>> program to appear in the ACM Collected Algorithms, it's a bit hard to
>> admit that PL/I was "insignificant". I'm proud, though, of having
>> conceived the SIGNAL statement, which pioneered exception handling,
>> and the USES and SETS attributes, which unfortunately sank into
>> oblivion. I also spurred Bud Lawson to invent -> for pointer-chasing.
>> The former notation C(B(A)) became A->B->C. This was PL/I's gift to C.

>> After the ACM program I never wrote another line of PL/I.
>> Gratification finally came forty years on when I met a retired
>> programmer who, unaware of my PL/I connection, volunteered that she
>> had loved PL/I above all other programming languages.

> My first language was actually PL/C  (and the computer centre did not 
> charge for runs in PL/C).  I needed to use PL/I for some thesis-related 
> work and ran into the JLC wall -- no issues with the former, many issues 
> with the latter.  One of the support people, upon learning that I was 
> using PL/I, said: "PL/I's alright!"

Inside IBM in the 70s, PL/I was definitely not "insignificant". From my 
perspective it was the most reasonable language available on VM/370. I 
arrived at Yorktown in 1975 fresh from Austin with a couple of boxes of 
punch cards of my "APLOMB" simulation program written in Fortran. I was 
surprised when I was encouraged to pursue major enhancement of APLOMB 
and dismayed by continuing in Fortran. After a period of increasing 
frustration, I wrote a SNOBOL program to convert APLOMB to PL/I and 
become the basis for RESQ 
(https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2020/08/25/remembering-resq/). As 
long as I avoided questionable parts of IBM's PL/I, I was happy with 
PL/I. It is hard to imagine that RESQ would have succeeded in any other 
language.

-- 
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  reply	other threads:[~2021-11-16 19:47 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <CAKH6PiXtVetBZbyvOiWZFSTvNebSTEuaYkOoUx4KPg4wtdvN8g@mail.gmail.com>
2021-11-16 18:54 ` Nemo Nusquam
2021-11-16 19:40   ` Charles H Sauer [this message]
2021-11-16 20:20   ` Bakul Shah
     [not found] ` <b355e6b8-720d-3078-d54a-2beb5ff79bd4@mhorton.net>
     [not found]   ` <CAEdTPBdVnPQMaDX0jOL81EkL1M7Eg=U4qWPwKMsr6SBc2Zz9vw@mail.gmail.com>
2021-11-23 15:23     ` [COFF] [TUHS] Book Recommendation Clem Cole
2021-11-24  0:38       ` [COFF] Self-hosting languages (was: Book Recommendation) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2021-11-24  1:48         ` Brantley Coile
2021-11-23 19:40     ` [COFF] [TUHS] Book Recommendation Dan Cross
2021-11-24  1:57     ` [COFF] PL/1 [Was: Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation] Nemo Nusquam

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