I also had a brief e-mail discussion with the authors of that article, trying to make a case that having tools such as PL/X and PL8 "out in the wild" would be a good thing, but my arguments did not make much headway.....sigh....
BTW, there is an effort underway now to add PL/I to the languages supported by the GCC compiler suite. It's an open source project, and they appear to have the parsing issues just about solved. More details can be found here: http://pl1gcc.sourceforge.net/ Tony Harminc wrote: > On 27/04/07, John Ticic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> More info. on the GNU PL8 compliler >> >> http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/483/gellerich.html >> >> Being GNU, does this mean that the PL8 compiler can be categorised as Open >> and available to the masses (what we would do with it is another matter)? > > No - it's IBM proprietary. I had a brief exchange with Dr. Gellerich > when this article came out, since I thought that the PL8 parser and > perhaps some of the other parts might form the basis for a GNU PL/I > (or even PL/X) compiler. I believe he was in touch with other PL/I > people about this, but I don't think it's gone anywhere. PL/I (and its > cousins like PL8 and PL/X) is not easily parsed using typical UNIXy > tools (it's not LR, or even LALR), so writing a parser is a big part > of the battle. > > PL8 is a frustrating example of a company taking open source software > that many people have contributed to, and then using it for internal > proprietary work, without returning anything to the community. But > it's allowed by the GPL; they are not distributing. And one could > argue that IBM overall has returned lots to the open source community. > > Tony H. -- DJ V/Soft ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
