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From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@math.utah.edu>
To: Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>
Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] PL/I stuff - was: Book Recommendation
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2021 18:48:17 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CMM.0.95.0.1637804897.beebe@gamma.math.utah.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <94b9315e-86f3-a294-9770-e1768fd1380c@gmail.com>

Will Senn asks on Wed, 24 Nov 2021 16:29:27 -0600:

>> What, if any, features does PL/I have that are not realized 
>> in a modern language?

One that I exploited heavily was the "ON ENDPAGE" trap: I wrote code
that we used from both PL/I and Fortran to attach running page
headers/footers, with a job name, timestamp, and page number.  This
mattered to us a lot when our nightly outputs sometimes ran to a box
of z-fold paper (1K or 2K sheet? my memory is hazy).

In Unix, of course, we would just run

	myprog | pr > myprog.lst

but IBM mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s did not have anything
remotely like that at academic customer sites.

Alas, all of my PL/I code archives were lost to a dumpster some 30
years ago: we lacked the disk space to make copies of a couple of
thousand 9-track tapes, and with the retirement of our DEC mainframes,
we no longer had 9-track tape drives to read the tapes.  I have long
regretted our action, but budgets, and the limited technology of the
time, gave us no option.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-11-25  1:50 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 53+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-11-16 14:57 [TUHS] " Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 15:22 ` Richard Salz
2021-11-16 15:52 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23  2:28 ` Mary Ann Horton
2021-11-23  7:57   ` Henry Bent
2021-11-23  8:10     ` arnold
2021-11-23  8:28       ` Henry Bent
2021-11-23 17:26     ` Adam Thornton
2021-11-23 18:54       ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23 19:04         ` Al Kossow
2021-11-23 19:39           ` Lawrence Stewart
2021-11-23 19:08       ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23 21:54   ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-11-24 15:18     ` Richard Salz
2021-11-24 15:45       ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-24 18:34       ` Rich Morin
2021-11-24 18:40         ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-24 19:39           ` Clem Cole
2021-11-24 20:02             ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-26 19:49               ` [TUHS] AIX/SMIT (was Book Recommendation) Greg A. Woods
2021-11-25 10:26           ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-11-25 12:20             ` [TUHS] AIX/SMIT (was Re: Book Recommendation) Stuart Remphrey
2021-11-24 20:13       ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation arnold
2021-11-24 20:18         ` Will Senn
2021-11-25  7:22         ` arnold
2021-11-24 20:15       ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 20:21         ` joe mcguckin
2021-11-24 20:27         ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 21:27           ` Richard Salz
2021-11-24 22:19       ` Charles Anthony
2021-11-24 22:29         ` [TUHS] PL/I stuff - was: " Will Senn
2021-11-24 23:00           ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 23:13             ` Richard Salz
2021-11-25  1:48           ` Nelson H. F. Beebe [this message]
2021-11-25  2:03             ` George Michaelson
2021-11-25 14:47               ` Clem Cole
2021-11-26 22:20                 ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-26 22:33               ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-27  0:23               ` Dennis Boone
2021-11-27  0:30                 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-27  0:47                   ` Charles H. Sauer
2021-11-27  2:43                     ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-27  0:56                   ` Warner Losh
2021-11-24 23:54 Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-25 16:35 ` Paul Winalski
2021-11-25 18:15   ` Steve Nickolas
2021-11-26 16:59   ` Paul Winalski
2021-11-26 20:30     ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-11-26 21:22       ` John Cowan
2021-11-27  0:01         ` George Michaelson
2021-11-27 16:12           ` Paul Winalski
2021-11-27 15:25 Noel Chiappa
2021-11-27 15:53 ` Charles H Sauer

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