PL/X started as BSL in the 1960s. At the time it supported imbedded assembler, which would not be portable. PL/S II still did. Open sourcing BSL or PL/S might not have been enough to prevent C; could you fit a compiler on a PDP-7 or PDP-11?
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Paul Gilmartin [0000000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu] Sent: Thursday, January 6, 2022 1:02 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: JCL (was: Python ... REXX) On Thu, 6 Jan 2022 12:57:34 -0400, René Jansen wrote: >JCL ... Fred Brooks (“the worst language ever, and it happened under my >watch”) . > ... >And indeed, I think witholding PL/X from customers was a very odd move, guided >by who-knows-which motives; which did not do PL/I a lot of good, unfortunately. > I conjecture fear of competition from RCA(?) Others(?) I don't know the chronology. I have long conjectured that if IBM had opened PL/X early enough, C would have been unnecessary. A colleague told me that SuperC was coded in PL/X and runs alike on MVS and OS/2. (Was an NDA breached or could that have been inferred from eyecatchers in the modules?) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
