PL/1 was my first language. I was majoring in Accounting, and my best friend from high school knew something about programming and tried to describe it. He must have botched the description because it sounded boring to me. Probably it was boring to Terry, is why.
But I figured an accountant should know ~something~ about computers, so I took one summer class in PL/1 -- or PL/C, actually, a subset of PL/1. I was hooked the very first day. I started spending all my spare time at the computer center, teaching myself BASIC and FORTRAN and writing games and accounting utilities just for fun, saving them on paper tape. My fiancée didn't care for the time I spent there, much. That fall I was offered a student job at the computer center, running the HASP station and helping other students debug their programs. I finished my degree, but I never looked back; I've been a computer geek ever since. I still remember PL/1 fondly; I love the control it gives one over different kinds of storage. But I haven't written much in it recently; I do more in interpreted languages, such as flavors of Visual Basic and of REXX. I took to programming naturally, and I still regard it as one of my superpowers, but I'm pretty sure I owe a lot of it to my teacher in that first class. How I honor that man! He started us off rather as you describe below: Suppose you need to write a program to compare two numbers and decide which is larger: What's the first thing the program has to do? There were various newbie-type guesses, all wrong, and he get us started: The first thing you have to do is GET THE FIRST NUMBER. And he wrote GET X on the board. Right there, the very first day, we were writing a PL/1 program, although we had no notion of algorithmic syntax. GET X; GET Y; IF X>Y THEN.... and so on. That fall in my job I met students learning COBOL who were in their sixth week and hadn't written their first program; they were just starting on the concept of loops. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* It will not do to meddle with him. He is the kind of lamb that lies down with the lion, in wolf's clothing. -from "The Letter of Marque" by Patrick O'Brian */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Phil Smith III Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 16:01 That was an observation. It meant they needed my help. Lots of it. Including offers of one-on-one tutoring (never taken up on, I'm afraid). Srsly, it was a fun class to work with. My dad's assignments were all text-based, things like: "Given a list of names: 'firstname lastname', convert them to 'lastname, firstname'. For extra credit, sort by lastname". They'd be COMPLETELY lost as to how to start this, and I'd say "Well, what do you need to do first?" "Um." "Maybe.read the input file?" "Oh, yes, that makes sense." and it would go from there. I quite enjoyed the didactic aspect of it, and I like to think it gave me a better appreciation of end-user thinking, which has come in handy over the last decades. A very Artsie friend took my dad's class several years later, and for his term project he fed it a list of teams and scores and generated headlines: "Bears claw Tigers 6-1" and the like. Good basic stuff, and a lot more relatable than "Calculate a square root" and the like, which (at least at the time) beginning CS class assignments tended to be! I've always been convinced that you learn a lot more doing things you can relate to. And my perspective it might've been sexUAL, but was hardly sexIST. My sisters inform me that the average male arts student is more appealing than the average male math/CS student, too. Meanwhile, nobody here uses PL/I, eh? --- Bob Bridges wrote: >Wait, it's "sexist" to distinguish between the beauty of female Arts students and of female computer-science students? They're both female, so that can't be sexist. >(Belatedly) Oh, you mean "...had no idea what they were doing with computers". But we don't know whether that's sexist until we know whether it was an observation or an assumption. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
