Re: Please welcome . . .

PhD = Ph. D
MJR = Mark J. Reed (me)
JWC = John Woldemar Cowan

PhD> PL/I allows negative subscripts. (The full standard, not the subset
PhD> standard.)

MJR> Didn't know that.  But what standard?  I thought PL/I was an IBM
MJR> proprietary language.

JWC> The full language is ANS X3.53, which was readopted as ISO 6160.  The
JWC> subset language is ANS X3.74.

PhD> There is an ANSI standard for PL/I dating from the late 1960s.
PhD> In the 1970s, ANSI published a subset standard for use on
PhD> minicomputers which eliminated the lesser-used and hard-to-
PhD> implement parts of the full standard.


Thank you both for correcting my ignorance in this matter.


PhD> PL/I was implemented by a number of manufacturers. I have
PhD> used it on a Univac 1110 mainframe and Data General
PhD> minicomputers. There were several versions available for the
PhD> IBM PC, but I don't know if any are still supported.

There currently seem to be commercial PL/I compilers for most UNIXes,
Linux, and Windows (all from the same company, Open PL/I), as well
as an old Digital Research one for DOS (that doesn't work in the DOS
environment of modern Windows OSes) which is free.

While we're off the topic - what's the relationship of PL/I to PL/M,
the language in which the non-assembly parts of CP/M were written?
Was it a subset of the subset, tailored for micros?

-Mark

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