🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <10...@ucsd.Edu> br...@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) writes:
>>Gerry Weinberg once told me that I should learn PL/1 as every other
>>programming language was a subset of it.  At the time I think that was
>>nearly true.
>
>Well, considering that LISP, SNOBOL, and APL were around at the time, I doubt it.
>(P.S., it's PL/I)
>-- 
>--Dick Wexelblat  (rw...@ida.org) 703 824 5511

I don't think he said "every other programming language DESCENDED from
PL/I", just that most of the ideas of the others were in PL/I
somewhere. That's more likely in the case of existant languages, right?

I agree with the comment, PL/I had elements of FORTRAN (a lot of it),
Algol (program structure, it pre-dated Pascal), BCPL (things like
UNSPEC() and the pre-processor), LISP (sort of, some wierd automatic
creation of list and other structures on demand), SNOBOL (sort of,
string ops), COBOL (Picture Variables, READ/WRITE builtins had
COBOL-like semantics), etc. PL/I was just plain baroque, it was often
impossible, at first glance, to tell that two programmer's efforts
were even in the same language because there were so many features and
styles possible.

But what can you expect from a language who's basic manual set was
something like 19 linear shelf-feet in size and would truncate most
significant digits from constant integers if they weren't declared
just right.

Everything was in there, but it was hardly a strength. Oh, and a macro
pre-processor about as powerful as the rest of the language, had
almost every control structure and variable type of the main language.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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