PL/1 (actually Cornell's PL/C, which had a simple REPL) was my very first programming language, back in 1973. At the time, for commercial programming, it was much nicer (IMO) than either Fortran or COBOL... It supported binary floating point like Fortran and decimal floating point like COBOL... on the other hand, it was a very large language, and I don't think they ever matched the performance of Fortran for scientific programming, so it didn't replace Fortran there, and COBOL just had a huge amount of inertia (and IMO the COBOL programmers of the time were not the sort to be looking for new and interesting languages to replace COBOL).
On Thursday, December 4, 2014 at 2:09:31 PM UTC-5, Big Stone wrote: > > I think I remember PL/1 (Programming Language number 1) was also a > langage so much better than anything previously invented that nobody could > doubt of it replacing everything. > >> >>
