While much of PL/s should be highly portable, GENERATE is very much 
architecture dependent.

PL.S, in the guise of BSL, goes back at least to the development of TSO and at 
least back to 1867.

Some of the relevant manuals are ZZ, meaning IBM confidential, but some are GC, 
meaning publicly available, although still subject to copyright. 


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of 
Tony Harminc [[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 1:52 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: looking for 'how to' developing Rexx host command

On Tue, 22 Mar 2022 at 11:07, Jay Maynard <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I never understood why IBM kept PL/S such a deep dark secret.

[See below.]

> Regardless, PL/S is intimately tied to the 370 and subsequent
> architectures, and C is not.

I'm not sure how intimately. There were dialects of PL/S for the 8100
(DPPX), and I think for the 37xx communication controllers. But in any
case PL/S syntax is clearly based on that of PL/I, and that is
certainly a highly portable language.

It's also arguable that C is tied closely to the PDP11 and similar
architectures, and only by ugly adaptations was it able to run on
other platforms.

> C also came out much earlier than PL/S, starting in about 1970.

I don't think so.

Both PL/S and C had predecessor languages that differed to various
degrees. C had B and BCPL, from which C had very substantial
differences. PL/S had BSL, which really wasn't much different from
PL/S or even current PL/X (or whatever it's called these days). Both
languages also have later dialects and/or offspring (e.g. PL.8, C++),
and that history is complex.

Wikipedia says that C dates from 1972. For PL/S it just says "the late
1960s", but there is BSL material on Bitsavers dated 1969, and a "BSL
Library" document from October 1967 which is not BSL itself, but
clearly refers to its existence.

[Some of the PL/S documents on Bitsavers are the very same ones that
had escaped to the wild and that IBM was chasing down around 1975.
That they felt at the time that it was worth flying a team of
blue-suited lawyers from Armonk around North America to try to get
hold of fuzzy photocopies of BSL manuals does suggest that it was
pretty important to them. I think this predated both the Fujitsu and
Rand situations, but perhaps IBM was already aware of both efforts.]

PL/eaSe:     
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1go2uHy-5yje8uqO2LaJUG-mISUqm2gS44XVUp-kQHA1pCDF5Bkst52bGgwQKgD4mN95xQfT-X-S56hVPNHD67rlt7PGyQCC6vzCK3LBs-usgUFcEOOcofsfAbPIAHyjgtl6cn3X2F1eL-KE__GhehAJvB6zcYx6cP2TYnRzTjBvQyDg1ch1eVXYzG2w52BW_SHXNyrm4P38kDkgFXZiWglXzhx8wlUIe_2rSfiyUjotiTRF9ZMdflYnUg0YmzYV3-qYVeoCp4LgbROUzGBwncwSJdyxf9HfO0JtLhPaAZhnxBzfYIvHo0ojdMeJzvpZmNJvFLVdeiI8nFI_MKtr4bJq-2WHJT9vzgo2FJ20lQAP-6Uo2yAR__HoS9LiwiH8xi0B4O21KJxo5NieyRL-28K9Qtv8P_Jo4zfzxd0-8cygj8pdRzYjRJd6NdE9TiJcX/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mxg.com%2Fthebuttonman%2Fhtml%2Fbutton196.htm
Rand's answer:  
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1y98GLznZFAPwsK3MR0lKo8vFRTlM-Vyfid72ddxIigrfdSApIBAeRzJISYdjN0E5JPX_yrz9EkNrKoc-kgWXcBsJMrBWTUldhn4Dkq_mBIg1U8-VA4tmlh5V9AcVOtLIrKxDubfNnrAzV6lquQEb3G_7Gvw1IPcgQthcpt8AZVuL8c_kgY5XYN-VsEZyCKji_ZyCiUBxM2sq_vnQBywD4xw_wAv39d2fS3a-9uMijMVum6s-MzxTvp2pfQgi8ckDkV4atDiTUqTeHu8_wbzaZowyal5Umh-Wsmhmi4_-OaPQKMF2agA13nvl3UkPAyyrdnD9MWhoA7E9CcoNHMuYQP7n9Z7-ODwlnAKLB4_OuZMfYTep6Vz_-EsQnBOi9EpD1LVn_o7FY0hjyDnXR8OBv4F189ZIFZKZK504oXLbq235B-XAZTZSZoRxhwFToYPQ/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mxg.com%2Fthebuttonman%2Fhtml%2Fbutton213.htm

https://secure-web.cisco.com/1K1TClFFuiCkEmuQK1z77FgzwLRTvYxO0wJ30JFYi0Y3qSEV98cSJnn2mQCetCVpa65fjRV9o8c3QIjmkyFg0f68s-b1kBy38u6K6Y2c14ktZzc7qMkJrYFHy50DVd2nyC3PjfcWJEgcGEUHeUQ9ZZv-H8LPfC0ID4JE-FnnTUg7imwEeqZHn25Uz1URUdJjtQa0pEVkADgB-v_JW385y2l6mmwMVHZfb8CN6W8nRdQHleI9leFZ3_Yd97p6MiEQ1f0ws37i1d2eBil_u1oOjpEMXgtQ8MdkoBpj-FmSO-S3S2xI_sffSn4T9mk5TgTOfO67yE51TWXBAzXrVw6MXjxST-fPAa4a2S1_ThTtxUCsPaWIbEAU-HW3RN5Ut2f4npEzAeWefwa0tg9u4gl9JERLm5wMPBESTKLyym342dbhkRJKtbfnaYIyD60b2kGlb/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mxg.com%2Fthebuttonman%2Fsearch.asp

Tony H.

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