23 Nov
2021
23 Nov
'21
8:28 a.m.
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.
As a grad student in 1976, my first job as a TA was to teach PL/I to
undergrads. There were a lot of business students in the class. We
thought PL/I was likely to be the future of business programming, as a
better alternative to COBOL.
I was turned on to V6 UNIX and C in 1977, and I forgot all about PL/I.
Mary Ann
On 11/16/2021 6:57 AM, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
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