[TUHS] Book Recommendation

[Ron Natalie]

PL/I was my introduction to structured programming (though it took a 
somewhat loose approach to that).   I always
Over my early years I spent time on a couple of implementations and 
always had been amused by its somewhat COBOLish IO scheme
and spent a little time dabbling in variants such as the IBM PL/S, 
UNIVAC PLUS, and the UofM interpretted PLUM.

Then I got introduced to C and it was all downhill from there :)


------ Original Message ------
From: "Douglas McIlroy" <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu>
To: "TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent: 11/16/2021 9:57:55 AM
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation

>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.
>
>Doug