PL/I

Description

George Radin
1931-01-22 to 2013-05-21 - One of the principal developers of PL/I at IBM

Sometimes incorrectly known as PL/1, while the language is indeed named Programming Language One, the one was always meant to be expressed as a Roman numerical rather than an Arabian one, as is the tradition with computer languages even today. The Arabic 1 is only used on vintage computer and communications systems like USENET where the lower case only system or display limitation means that there is not Roman I available.

There are some variants of the language that are by now completely forgotten such as the safe variant SPL/I, that was designed at the behest of the USA department of defence in the early 1970's and was intended to be the language used for all non-business type programming done for the DoD but it end they gave up due to the variability of implementations and

PL/M

A language introduced in 1972 by Gary Kidall to allow development of computer programs for 4 and 8 bit microcomputers, full name being Programming Language for Microcomputers. Initially a very minimalistic version of PL/I that lacked even a standard I/O but later versions added features from sundry languages, which makes the latter PL/M versions somwhat unlike PL/I in many respects. Kidall sold the rights to his compiler to Intel who sold a version of the language for about 30 years mainly targeting the embedded market, but in addition he used the language to develop the CP/M operating system and used it as the main development language of Digital Research until the mid 80's. Digital released a PL/I compiler at the end of the decade for CP/M that implemented a properly defined subset of the language and that toolkit was later ported to DOS

A list of OS/2 implementations of PL/I

• IBM PL/I for OS/2 - Commercial - Discontinued
• IBM VisualAge PL/I Enterprise - Commercial - Discontinued
• Iron Spring PL/I - Freeware - Current
• PL1GCC - An incomplete front end for GCC - Open source - Discontinued.

A list of DOS implementations of PL/I

• DR PL/I - The old Digital Research, available for DOS and CP/M - Discontinued - Commercial - Now freeware.

DOS Libraries and class libraries

• DR PL/I Libraries - The old Digital Research libraries for the above compiler, disassembled - Discontinued - Commercial - Now freeware.

Generic or cross platform source code

• PL/I grammar for Coctail - By CoCoLab
• PL/I to Cobol - Open source software that converts PL/I structures to COBOL structures, but not whole programs so far.

Publications

• Archives of old PL/I Bulletins newsletters - Hosted by Iron Spring Software

Tutorials and other learning material

• Software Engineers Handbook/Language Dictionary/PLI - From Wikibooks, more of a command listing than anything else and not complete.

Tips'n'Tricks

• Ask Felgall - Sundry small tips for beginners.

Links

• PL/I resources page - Sundry PL/I related stuff including old newsletter archives.

Mailing lists & forums

• PL/I Developers - On Yahoo groups - very low volume list intended for people that are developing PL/I tools, not for general PL/I programming discusssion.

USENET

• comp.lang.pl1 - Fairly low volume - Go to the Google groups version if you or your ISP are in any way newsgroup challenged.

Standards

• ANSI INCITS 74-1987 (R1998) - A PL/I Subset for generic programming (Subset G)