PL/X is close to PL/I and not at all close to C. PL/X also includes imbedded HLASM.
I have no idea what the percentages are, but MVS is written in a mixture of C, HLASM, Pascal (probably gone) and PL/X (under various names). -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <ASSEMBLER-LIST@listserv.uga.edu> on behalf of Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> Sent: Monday, January 22, 2018 11:26 AM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@listserv.uga.edu Subject: Re: Fair comparison C vs HLASM Um, isn't MVS mostly written in PL/X, which I would argue is closer to C than to assembler? Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jon Perryman Sent: Monday, January 22, 2018 7:44 AM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Fair comparison C vs HLASM Resending my original Email because it was badly mangled. Sorry for the inconvenience. I find it amazing how C programmers believe in the superiority despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Surprisingly, the psychological term for this is "motivated reasoning" and I never believed it until now. Below actually transpired yet they still believe that C is superior (even with an examples). In another newsgroup, someone mentioned that C is THE GOTO system language (specifically mentioning Windows) and that there is very little need for assembler. C is the goto language for Unix. Windows has a lot of assembler which requires their code be written in C#. I also commented that C is a weak language compared to HLASM and gave some examples that force bad coding techniques (e.g. XML parser). A C programmer took offence because he had written an efficient XML parser in C. Below is psuedo C logic and the assembler to do the same functionality. Realize the C programmer felt C XML parsing needed less than 10 lines but those 10 lines ended up being the first line in the pseudo code. He did not believe me until I gave him the examples. Another unhappy C programmer decided to give me an impossible challenge by asking for a program where he could not replace a single line with efficient C code. To be cheeky but technically correct, I responded IEFBR14. More unhappy, he decided it must be a system program. I required that a C programmer must be able to modify and maintain it once written in C. My choice was IDCCDAL which contains the parser statements for TSO ALTER. That wouldn't make him happy, so lets make it at least a little fair where at least 10% must be in C and the assembler code must use the techniques we now use. My choice would be all the TSO IDCAM commands. I've always thought HLASM was good. I now realize It's extremely impressive despite all it's warts. Without HLASM, we would not have z/OS, VSE and VM. Imagine writing MVS in C (no SYS1.MACLIB capabilities or the other features). C programmers are hampered by their
