Re: PL/I nostalgia, was Decades of compiler technology and what do we get?

(snip, someone wrote)
> > > > There isn't any need. We're fixing existing COBOL and it's easy to
> > > > fix. Just take stuff out of loops that doesn't belong there! It
> > > > works great..


(big snip, including generated code listing from PL/I)


> Maybe the experts in this group would like to give their thoughts about
> the why of this apparently/seemingly/obviously ridiculous(?) regression?


> [The conventional wisdom is that COBOL programs are all I/O bound, so
> the speed of the object code is not a big deal. There are plenty of
> other compilers that can optimize this kind of stuff. -John]


It has always seemed to me that PL/I would have been more successful
if the early compilers generated faster code (and ran faster, too).


It might have been that too much of the above was adopted, along with
other COBOL features, by PL/I. There are many things that other
languages, such as Fortran, traditionally didn't let you do, because
they might run too slow, but that PL/I allowed.


(Many of those have now been added to Fortran.)


Of all languages, I think I still find PL/I the most fun to write in,
though not necessarily best for the problems I actually need done.


-- glen

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