> On Feb 16, 2025, at 2:54 PM, Van Snyder via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2025-02-16 at 09:32 -0500, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>> A lot of early "ALGOL" compilers did major subsetting because it was
>> considered to hard to do the real language.
>
> IBM invented PL/1. IBM (or at least IBM Canada) wrote their excellent
> Fortran compilers in a subset of PL/1 called PLIX, that is PL.9.
I remember PL/C, a compiler for student use created at Cornell U. My compiler
class was at first required to build on that, because the prof had been the
lead implementer of PL/C. We finally got excused from that requirement because
we had to use lots of macros, and the macro processing in that compiler often
caused the compiler to crash. The problem is the macro expander (foolishly)
tried to honor the "source margins" property of the original input text.
So we switched to Pascal on the PDP-10, which was vastly superior in every way,
and I haven't been tempted to touch PL/I since.
paul
