"I remember reading that Fred Brooks regrets that it wasn't the systems programming language for OS/360. I suppose because it was a big, complex language for the time it didn't quite make the cut."
I've always been kind of curious about that. I wonder if, although (since) it was as you wrote "big, complex for the time", whether it was a question of risk management at seminal early stage of OS/360 development that caused assembler to be used so extensively.....in the sense that the latter was a 'known quantity' in an environment where there were more than enough other relative unknowns in play. Or perhaps from an alternate history perspective, whether PL/1 would have proven "up to the task" functionally at that point ? Exactly when was the PL/S systems programming flavor devloped and put into use ? And was PL/1 ever really implemented on predecessors to the 360 (70xx perhaps or some other pre 360 IBM mainframe), either for internal company use or made more generally available -- would that even have made sense ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
