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From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
To: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Public access multics
Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2018 14:18:06 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABH=_VTwNPFf8rei_aMsjPqK=vu6wG=ULBtHdGaJ_0=va8Ra=Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.1809022258340.28912@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On 9/2/18, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> I have never seen a full-blown PL/I compiler (only subsets), and I recall
> being told that there never will be one because it is simply impossible,
> given the spec.
>
> Naturally I am happy to be proven wrong on this.

IBM had PL/I compilers for TOS, DOS, and OS on System/360, and for
DOS/VS and OS/VS on System/370.  If those weren't full implementations
of the original spec, they were pretty close.

IBM PL/I had a good number of what I call toxic language features,
such as the DEFAULT statement (which was Fortran's IMPLICIT on
steroids).  Most PL/I shops had as part of their coding standards a
set of language features banned from the code.  The ANSI standard
eliminated a lot of these, although it also threw out some useful
features such as iSUB defining and by-name structure assignment.

One of my favourite features was sterling pictures, with pounds,
shillings, and pence fields (represented internally as a packed
decimal value in pence).  Sterling pictures weren't finally deprecated
in the IBM PL/I compilers until 1979, IIRC.

-Paul W,.

  parent reply	other threads:[~2018-09-02 18:18 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2018-09-01 20:31 Will Senn
     [not found] ` <CAC20D2N-Q4VY8TLZagS6J2-US1G3emXVcOdX1BQZ44HYukD6ug@mail.gmail.com>
2018-09-01 20:50   ` [TUHS] Fwd: " Clem Cole
2018-09-01 21:27 ` [TUHS] " jcs
2018-09-01 23:24   ` John P. Linderman
2018-09-02 13:06     ` Dave Horsfall
2018-09-02 16:23       ` Charles Anthony
2018-09-02 18:18       ` Paul Winalski [this message]
2018-09-02 19:09         ` Paul Winalski
2018-09-02  0:57   ` Dan Cross
2018-09-02  2:06     ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2018-09-02  2:32   ` Charles Anthony
2018-09-02  2:52     ` Larry McVoy
2018-09-01 23:25 [TUHS] Fwd: " Noel Chiappa
2018-09-02  4:05 ` Will Senn
2018-09-02  4:25   ` [TUHS] " Jeffrey H. Johnson
2018-09-02 22:30     ` Will Senn
2018-09-01 23:33 Noel Chiappa
2018-09-01 23:44 ` jcs
     [not found] <5B48F6A3-374A-4579-AE8F-35BD328D07F9@reagan.com>
2018-09-02  3:17 ` Jeffrey H. Johnson
2018-09-02 21:47 Doug McIlroy
2018-09-03  6:18 ` arnold
2018-09-03 13:29 Doug McIlroy
2018-09-03 23:41 ` Dave Horsfall
2018-09-04  2:47   ` Jeffrey H. Johnson

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