On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 09:56, Henry Schaffer wrote:
> P.S. I didn't care for PL/I because of its complexity and awkwardness,

After a year or two of Fortran IV and COBOL at university, PL/I came as
a breath of fresh air.

Complex?  Certainly, but there weren't many problems you couldn't tackle
with it.  Based variables, area and offset support, stream and record
oriented I/O, label arrays (good for state machines), recursion,
multitasking, reentrancy, event handling, other goodies.  UNSPEC could
be used as a target of assignment -- a sometimes reprehensible practice,
but one that I still prefer over explicit casts in more modern
languages.

Complexity by itself doesn't kill a language's usefulness.  (cf. Perl)

--
David Andrews
A. Duda and Sons, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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