[TUHS] Book Recommendation

Henry Bent henry.r.bent at gmail.com
Tue Nov 23 18:28:23 AEST 2021


On Tue, 23 Nov 2021 at 03:10, <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 22 Nov 2021 at 21:31, Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:
> >
> > > PL/I was my favorite mainframe programming language my last two years
> as
> > > an undergrad. I liked how it incorporated ideas from FORTRAN, ALGOL,
> and
> > > COBOL. My student job was to enhance a PL/I package for a History
> > > professor.
> > >
> >
> > What language were the PL/I compilers written in?
> >
> > Wikipedia claims that IBM is still developing a PL/I compiler, which I
> > suppose I have no reason to disbelieve, but I'm very curious as to who is
> > using it and for what purpose.
> >
> > -Henry
>
> PL/1 compiler for Linux: http://www.iron-spring.com/
>
> PL/1 front end for GCC (looks dead): pl1gcc.sourceforge.net


"Expect some more releases soon" and the last release was 0.0.whatever, in
2007.  I think that speaks volumes as to how popular PL/I is today.  That
being said, the Linux compiler does appear to be actively developed, and I
suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the two platforms for active
development are Linux and OS/2 (!).

I have a vague recollection of installing and playing with a PL/I compiler
demo for Ultrix, but I figured that the language was essentially dead at
that point.  I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that there are still
people using it, as this is the world of "we wrote the specifications in
1975 and there's no reason to update them," but I have a hard time
imagining those companies being truly competitive, and an even harder time
imagining them attracting talent under retirement age.

-Henry
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