6 Jul
2024
6 Jul
'24
9:32 p.m.
On 7/6/2024 3:56 PM, John R Levine wrote:
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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ESPOL predators all of them, although one can say
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