Wikipedia: PLI/Talk

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I deleted the following, which is not true:

: The original IBM mainframes used the same symbol 'I' for both the letter 'I' and the number '1'. Thus, the way that it is commonly written and normally spelled are different.

IBM mainframes used separate symbols for the letter and the number. The 'I' in PL/I is a [roman numeral]?. -- Simon J Kissane

: Thank you. That's what I thought, too, but wasn't sure enough about 3 decade old memories to make the change. --Buz Cory

The bit about SABRE is from personal experience. I was offered (and turned down) a position with the SABRE project ca 1965. Don't know if they stayed w/ PL/I or changed to a different language.

The (military/aerospace) project I was on at the time would have used PL/I if it had been useable early enough. We went through major contortions to do a real-time/multi-tasking system requiring dynamic allocation of records (structs to you C weenies) in FORTRAN IV. Further, FORTRAN required 512K of RAM to compile, the PL/I compiler would work in 128K. --Buz Cory

Not so sure about that "case insensitive" part. At that time virtually all work was done entirely in upper case due to hardware limitations. --Buz Cory

Nice job on the history. Some references to written documents (which I understand may not exist) would be nice. If its personal experience, then say so. --drj


: The parts of the history that I wrote are personal experience. If one can find copies of Datamation from ca 1965, the arguments that I mentioned about not using PL/1 are in there. The part about NELIAC? is from a book I read ca 1962 whose name and author I cannot recall.
: The part above about system requirements for FORTRAN and PL/1 is also personal recall. --Buz Cory

Most of the history stuff I added is purely from memory. I read it somewhere. I wasn't even alive when PL/I was being developed. -- Simon J Kissane