I saw this in the Programming Language News blog...
PL/I for GCC 0.0.14 has been released. It is a PL/I front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection.I wonder who's using it for what. Which computers ran PL/I in the past? IBM had an implementation for mainframes. Maybe for other mid-range systems as well?
PL/I was the systems programming language for Data General's mini and supermini computers. That's where I used it. I understand this was not quite *all* of IBM's PL/I specification. The language is fairly large.
It is somewhat more attractive than COBOL from my limited experience with both languages. It was straightforwardly procedural and recursive, with a reasonable exception handling mechanism. I'm not sure why PL/I did not win out over COBOL, unless it was the shear momentum of COBOL before PL/I was ready.
Update
Doug Landauer adds some interesting history in the comments. I forgot about Gary Kildall and PL/M.
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Gary Kildall wrote one or more PL/I (subset) compilers for micros (8080 and, later, 8086). Later, PL/M was a descendent -- a smaller, simpler language but with somewhat similar syntax -- heavily used at Digital Research on the Operating Systems that were CP/M's descendents. Search "Gary Kildall" "PL/I compiler" will yield pointers to start some research, if desired.
Seems to me that PL/I lost out to COBOL for many of the same reasons that Ada lost out to C++ fifteen to twenty years later. PL/I was seen as this huge, complex beast of a language, with everyone's favorite kitchen sink thrown in, while COBOL was already pervasive, a necessary evil. COBOL's complexities didn't seem to matter as much, because they were already familiar.
PL/I had some funky features that were seen as difficult to implement at the time -- "on conditions", an early form of exceptions; and arbitrary user-specified data/word-size precision, with a zillion rules about how differently-sized variables would combine.
(Historical note: Some of my first real programs were written in PL/I, and run on one or the other of the IBM-360/91's at UCLA, around 1968. Also, I worked at Digital Research from 1984 to 1986, the most amusing aspect of which was that they still considered themselves to be serious competition for Microsoft.)
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