On Tue, 3 Jul 2007 15:02:14 -0400, Chris Hoelscher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>when I was a freshman at (The) Ohio State University waaaay back >in 1975, ... You're making me feel old. (Ok, ok. I already felt old.) >...I took a PL/I class - we were told then that this was *such* an all >encompassing and easy-to-learn language that COBOL and >FORTRAN would be non-existant as a commercial programming >language within 5 years .... > >well, they were half right - haven;t seen many Fortran shops recently ... >... They were obviously wrong about COBOL and probably wrong about FORTRAN (although I have no idea what goes on in scientific and engineering shops where it might be used). But I think they got the "easy to learn" part right. When I was a senior at University of Washington (Seattle) in 1968 I worked part time as an operator at the IBM datacenter. I found an old draft copy of an early PLI/F Reference manual and taught myself PL/I. I was never really proficient, and never tried esoterica like its subtask (synchronous processing) support, but was able to write some pretty useful little tools. I lost access to a PL/I compiler in 1986, but shortly thereafter got access to REXX. Near as I can tell, the easy parts of PL/I were lifted from PL/I and plopped down n REXX. If you know REXX you pretty much know simple PL/I. (Just don't forget the semicolon that is optional in REXX. And the PROCEDURE statement.) Pat O'Keefe ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
