We are a big insurance company in Germany, and we do PL/1 until today. We also do ASM and C, but no COBOL - never.
I heard some years ago that only about 5 % of the mainframe programs are PL/1,
compared to 80 % COBOL. Don't know, if the numbers are correct. Most PL/1 users are in southern Germany (where we are) and Japan. I also heard that we in Germany (or Europe) spell it PL/1, but in the other places it's called PL/I. Kind regards Bernd Am 18.01.2012 00:22, schrieb Roberts, John J:
I was a PL/I developer around 1972. I loved it with BASED variables and STRING types. But up in Canada it really fell out of favor after about 1975. A lot of people were trying to do apps that were pretty marginal on the 370/158's of the day. So a lot of customers did COBOL or ASM, not PL/I. PL/I was reputed to have a 30% disadvantage compared to PL/I. My old employer the Bank of Montreal did its retail banking system in CICS/ASM and its Mortgage system in COBOL. When I visited the IBM Hursley Lab in 1976 I was told that PL/I had only really caught on in Europe. No doubt once they got past the "F" compiler and onto the many Optimizing Compilers things must have improved. I wonder if there is a present-day benchmark comparison? Also, is it PL/1 or PL/I? John
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