7 Jul
2024
7 Jul
'24
7:39 a.m.
It appears that Charles H Sauer (he/him) <sauer(a)technologists.com> said:
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.
John Cocke said in a paper in IBM J R&D V44 #1/2, Jan 2000, p 50:
The result [of the language design] was the PL.8 language, the
".8" implying that it had about 80% of the richness of PL/I.
PL.8 bore the same relation to PL/I as the 801 architecture
had to System/370.
Not gonna argue with him.
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)
For the most part Fortran could be pretty portable. The hard parts
were when you were trying to get reliable numeric results in complex
calculations, or you were doing stuff that Fortran didn't do very
well like pre-F77 string handling.
R's,
JOhn