Re: PL/I nostalgia, was Decades of compiler technology and what do we get?

From	glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: PL/I nostalgia, was Decades of compiler technology and what do we get?
Date	2012-04-23 00:03 +0000
Organization	Aioe.org NNTP Server
Message-ID	<12-04-077@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<12-04-070@comp.compilers>

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(snip, someone wrote)
> > > > There isn't any need. We're fixing existing COBOL and it's easy to
> > > > fix. Just take stuff out of loops that doesn't belong there! It
> > > > works great..

(big snip, including generated code listing from PL/I)

> Maybe the experts in this group would like to give their thoughts about
> the why of this apparently/seemingly/obviously ridiculous(?) regression?

> [The conventional wisdom is that COBOL programs are all I/O bound, so
> the speed of the object code is not a big deal. There are plenty of
> other compilers that can optimize this kind of stuff. -John]

It has always seemed to me that PL/I would have been more successful
if the early compilers generated faster code (and ran faster, too).

It might have been that too much of the above was adopted, along with
other COBOL features, by PL/I. There are many things that other
languages, such as Fortran, traditionally didn't let you do, because
they might run too slow, but that PL/I allowed.

(Many of those have now been added to Fortran.)

Of all languages, I think I still find PL/I the most fun to write in,
though not necessarily best for the problems I actually need done.

-- glen

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Decades of compiler technology and what do we get? Robert AH Prins <robert@prino.org> - 2012-04-22 18:57 +0000
  Re: Decades of compiler technology and what do we get? Robert AH Prins <robert@prino.org> - 2012-04-22 22:14 +0000
  Re: PL/I nostalgia, was Decades of compiler technology and what do we get? glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-04-23 00:03 +0000
    Re: PL/I nostalgia "robin" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2012-04-25 09:07 +1000
      Re: PL/I nostalgia glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-04-24 23:52 +0000
        Re: PL/I nostalgia "robin" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2012-04-28 21:30 +1000
          Re: PL/I nostalgia glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-04-28 16:11 +0000
            Re: PL/I nostalgia Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> - 2012-04-29 10:16 -0400
            Re: PL/I code "robin" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2012-05-05 00:45 +1000
              Re: PL/I code glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-05-05 05:20 +0000
                Re: Fortran calls, was PL/I code glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-05-06 05:13 +0000
                Re: Archaic hardware (was Fortran calls) "robin" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2012-05-09 10:46 +1000
          Re: PL/I nostalgia "robin" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2012-09-19 11:04 +1000
            Re: PL/I nostalgia glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-09-19 03:56 +0000
              Re: PL/I nostalgia "robin" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2012-09-21 13:53 +1000
                Re: PL/I nostalgia glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-09-21 07:00 +0000
                Re: PL/I nostalgia "robin" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2012-09-30 10:45 +1000

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