[COFF] Of PL/I
Charles H Sauer (he/him)
sauer at technologists.com
Wed Apr 3 03:01:56 AEST 2024
On 4/2/2024 11:40 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 2, 2024 at 11:23 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org
> <mailto:dave at horsfall.org>> wrote:
>
> Has there ever been a full implementation of PL/I?
>
> Well all of the IBM, GE/Honeywell and DEC compilers were certified. Bob
> Freiburghouse (who was part of the Multics compiler if I understand this
> right), created a firm in Mass that built a number of commercial
> compilers for a number of folks, with PL/1 being their prime. In fact
> when DEC bought the PL/1 front-end from them (which was in PL/1 of
> course), Culter and team wrote the VAX back-end, they had to
> cross-compile in Cambridge (I think at MIT) and bring the assembler
> source back to ZKO in Nashua to assemble and test.
>
> It seems akin tosolving the halting problem...
>
> No more than Algol-68 and many modern languages.
>
>
> Yes, I've used PL/I in my CompSci days, and was told that IBM had
> trademarkedeverything from /I to /C :-)
>
> I think that is more like an urban legend and IBM's notorious marketing
> behavior since Gary Kidall (who was originally a compiler guy) created
> PL/M for the 8080 and sold it to Intel.
>
>
> -- Dave, who loved PL/360
>
> Yeah - it might have been Nicklaus Wirth's best language. I still have
> the Standford manuals, but I can not say I have seen a working compiler
> since the late 1970s :-)
I was ready to jump in, but since I didn't have a definitive answer, I
waited for someone (Clem) who would really know.
The vast majority of my undergraduate and graduate school work was in
CDC Fortran. When I joined IBM Yorktown in 1975, I brought that work
with me in thousands of punched cards. Initially, I continued my
simulation work in Fortran. As that work became more important, Fortran
was unacceptable. I wrote a Fortran to PL/I crude translator in SNOBOL,
had the PL/I version running in a couple of weeks, and didn't look back.
Being judicious in using just the good parts, PL/I seemed just fine.
Essentially all of my work at Yorktown was in PL/I.
The 801 people created PL.8, which was primarily a subset of the good
parts of PL/I, but with some changes that I'd have to research to remember.
Charlie
ᐧ
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