From: "CM Poncelet" <[email protected]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2022 11:58 AM
AFAIK The reason PL/I was not 'more popular' was its high license fee.
There was an alternatve available, namely, PL/C.
Meanwhile, I've known people use even COBOL to write/maintain system code. As for me, I wrote all system code in assembler - bar adhoc stuff, as in to be executed once only (e.g. to convert CICS DFHCSD [?] RDO-defined LU2 connections and sessions to their equivalent assembler DFHTCT entries and macros,) which I then wrote in PL/I to save time. Not sure about PL/I being considered "too slow": it *could* be compiled with the 'optimize' [or similar] option, in the 1980's.
Well, from 1980 there were available the PL/I checkout and Optimising compilers. The Optimising compiler had the REORDER option that permitted a wider range of optimisations that without the option specified. Even before that, PL/I (F) had an optimising option. Of course, PL/I (F) could be used beyond 1980. It's quite possible that some users and organisations were not aware of the REORDER option. The classic case was that of Tucker, who, in his book comparing run times of languages, failed to use the REORDER option. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
