On Tue, 22 Mar 2022 at 11:07, Jay Maynard <jaymayn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I never understood why IBM kept PL/S such a deep dark secret.
[See below.] > Regardless, PL/S is intimately tied to the 370 and subsequent > architectures, and C is not. I'm not sure how intimately. There were dialects of PL/S for the 8100 (DPPX), and I think for the 37xx communication controllers. But in any case PL/S syntax is clearly based on that of PL/I, and that is certainly a highly portable language. It's also arguable that C is tied closely to the PDP11 and similar architectures, and only by ugly adaptations was it able to run on other platforms. > C also came out much earlier than PL/S, starting in about 1970. I don't think so. Both PL/S and C had predecessor languages that differed to various degrees. C had B and BCPL, from which C had very substantial differences. PL/S had BSL, which really wasn't much different from PL/S or even current PL/X (or whatever it's called these days). Both languages also have later dialects and/or offspring (e.g. PL.8, C++), and that history is complex. Wikipedia says that C dates from 1972. For PL/S it just says "the late 1960s", but there is BSL material on Bitsavers dated 1969, and a "BSL Library" document from October 1967 which is not BSL itself, but clearly refers to its existence. [Some of the PL/S documents on Bitsavers are the very same ones that had escaped to the wild and that IBM was chasing down around 1975. That they felt at the time that it was worth flying a team of blue-suited lawyers from Armonk around North America to try to get hold of fuzzy photocopies of BSL manuals does suggest that it was pretty important to them. I think this predated both the Fujitsu and Rand situations, but perhaps IBM was already aware of both efforts.] PL/eaSe: https://www.mxg.com/thebuttonman/html/button196.htm Rand's answer: https://www.mxg.com/thebuttonman/html/button213.htm https://www.mxg.com/thebuttonman/search.asp Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
