16 Feb
2025
16 Feb
'25
1:53 p.m.
On Feb 16, 2025, at 2:54 PM, Van Snyder via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Sun, 2025-02-16 at 09:32 -0500, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
I remember PL/C, a compiler for student use created at Cornell U. My compiler class was
at first required to build on that, because the prof had been the lead implementer of
PL/C. We finally got excused from that requirement because we had to use lots of macros,
and the macro processing in that compiler often caused the compiler to crash. The problem
is the macro expander (foolishly) tried to honor the "source margins" property
of the original input text.
So we switched to Pascal on the PDP-10, which was vastly superior in every way, and I
haven't been tempted to touch PL/I since.
paul
A lot of early "ALGOL" compilers did
major subsetting because it was
considered to hard to do the real language.
IBM invented PL/1. IBM (or at least IBM Canada) wrote their excellent
Fortran compilers in a subset of PL/1 called PLIX, that is PL.9.