Re: PL/S programming language

Joe Morris wrote:

>>someone@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 writes:
> 
> 
>>Many years ago, about 1974. I read a book on PL/S that was in the
>>University Library. If you have access to a University Library you
>>might try searching there. This PL/S was a PL/1 style of language. And
>>it was designed to write system software. As I remember the publisher
>>would also sell you a PL/S compiler written in PL/S. I don't know if
>>this is the same PL/S or not.
> 
> 
> Sigh.  PL/S was the bane of customer sysprogs; it took the soft-of-PL/1 
> input languag and emitted assembler source, but that assembler source 
> violated just about every imaginable standard of decency.

PL/S was always a strange beast.  Other vendors who developed PL/I-like 
systems languages took a different tack and wrote actual compilers, 
perhaps with hardware instructions as builtin functions.  Honeywell 
PL-6, or even IBM's own PL.8 followed this paradigm.

> 
> IBM did distribute source listings (and occasionally machine readable 
> mateial) of some of the modules that were written in PL/S, and claimed
that 
> it was "distributing the source" -- and someone, somewhere in IBM was so
far 
> out of touch with reality that he expected customers to be content with
that 
> garbage.  

It *was* usable, though.  I did some VSAM performance improvements via 
an "exit" I patched into one of the OPEN modules.  All I needed was to 
replace one instruction with a BALR to a routine that called my code. 
AS long as there was patch space available I was set.  I started with 
the source; later I had to work from the fiche, and still later I had to 
disassemble the module to find where to patch.  Fortunately we stopped 
making heavy use of VSAM about this time, so I was able to drop my fix 
in a later release.

IBM was adamant that it would not make available to customers
> either the PL/S compiler or the language specs, although there were a
few 
> underground copies floating around the user community.

They made some noise about distributing PL/S.  I believe copies actually 
made there way to some customers.  Then they decided not to release it 
due, so I heard, to worries about sup****ting it.

> 
> This was the issue that spawned the famous SHARE button (IIRC by Melinda

> Varian; not sure of the exact wording): "We want to fix the system in
the 
> language it broke in".
> 
> Joe Morris 
> 
>