7 Jul
2024
7 Jul
'24
5:46 a.m.
There was a ‘military’ standard ForTran 66. It was more difficult to use than the various
ForTran IVs, which had several niceties like string literals, but the code was at least
more portable. This was about 40 years ago so details are fading.
On 7 Jul 2024, at 7:32 AM, Charles H Sauer (he/him)
<sauer(a)technologists.com> wrote:
On 7/6/2024 3:56 PM, John R Levine wrote:
Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley(a)gmail.com
On Sat, 6 Jul 2024, Clem Cole wrote:
I like the 80% explanation, but suspect PL.8 was really named PL.8 to go along with the
801 processor architecture defined in Building 801 aka Thomas J. Watson Research Center in
Yorktown Heights. There are probably living Yorktown alumni that could be definitive.
I found PL/I quite usable as long as one kept it simple. But then, I also found Fortran
usable as long as one kept it simple. Regarding Fortran portability, I did all my
dissertation work on punched cards using CDC Fortran on the 6400/6600 at the UT-Austin
computation center. I brought several boxes of cards to Yorktown and don't remember
any significant difficulty getting my simulator and other programs to run on VM/370 there.
The absence of pointers and structures in Fortran was annoying. Eventually I used SNOBOL
to quickly translate the Fortran to PL/I (https://technologists.com/sauer/RESQPPP.pdf)
Charlie
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since it was only
available on Burroughs large, medium, and small systems - it was retargeted,
but not widely used.
Good point.
Other systems programming languages followed,
BCPL, BLISS, PL/360 and even
B before C. If you consider PL/M a child of PL/360 (which is was more than
child of PL/1 if you look at it), all of the others have code generators
and libraries for multiple ISA and OS and did before C did. That said, I
don't think any fo them have as many targets as C and many FORTRAN.
Untangling the sequence of all this stuff is hard. BCPL was indeed retargeted at a lot of
machines but it's not clear how portable programs were since the word sizes varied so
much from 16 to 60 bits, but couldn't deal with byte addressed memory which is a
large reason we have C.
The original version of BLISS was only for the PDP-10. DEC retargeted it to the PDP-11
and VAX, but I think that was after Unix moved to the Interdata and possibly other
machines.
PL360 was Wirth's implentation language for Algol W, a 360 assembler with Algol-like
syntax that had nothing to do with PL/I and only targeted the 360. I used it, it was
pretty nice.
Are you maybe thinking of IBM's PL.8 or PL/S? The former was originally for the
801, later S/360 and ROMP, the latter used for S/360 system programming. PL.8 was about
80% of PL.I, hence the name, PL/S a subset with some hackery like register declarations
and in-line assembler.
R's,
John