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Re: COBOL and tricks

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According to Alan Bowler  <atbowler@thinkage.ca>:
>On 2022-07-24 1:31 a.m., 25B.Z959 wrote:
>>    Ah ... PL/I ... one of the great "and the kitchen sink too"
>>    languages. Not awful - usually several ways to accomplish
>>    the same thing ... ie "flexibility". A bit odd though, like
>>    a mutant hybrid of Algol and BASIC
>
>PL/I looked like a merge of Fortran, Cobol, and bit of Algol
>that managed to produce the cross-product of the problems of
>all three.

It didn't look like a merge of them, that's what it was, since its
goal was to be a language to replace Fortran and COBOL on IBM
mainframes.

The early PL/I compilers had their problems, such as terrible code
when you wrote stuff that wasn't what people typically did. I tried to
use an array of 12-bit strings to simulate a PDP-8's memory and
somehow the code to access it included conversion to decimal and back.

I believe that current PL/I compilers work quite well, and the language
has evolved somewhat to fix the rough edges, but outside of a few
old IBM shops, nobody cares.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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Re: COBOL and tricks Alan Bowler <atbowler@thinkage.ca> - 2022-08-19 22:08 -0400
  Re: COBOL and tricks John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2022-08-20 03:20 +0000
    Re: COBOL and tricks Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2022-08-19 17:59 -1000
      Re: COBOL and tricks Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2022-08-20 11:48 -1000

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