Re: PL/S programming language

Jim Mehl wrote:
> If I recall correctly, PL/S was orignially known as 
 > BSL (Basic Systems Language).

Correct.

I may actually have a do***ent somewhere. I think it
> was influenced by PL/360.

Not PL360.  The latter was conceived by Niklaus Wirth
of Pascal and Oberon fame while he was still at Stanford.
It looked like Algol 60, but it was a higher level
assembler for the I.B.M. 360 &c. machines.  While it
s****ted base(-index)-offset addressing, it didn't
have any sort of macros, and even with it's function-
definition facility (c.f. OPSYN in many assemblers) it
didn't have enough assembler guts to make use of all of
the s/360 instructions and data types (e.g. BXH, BXLE,
CCW, ...).  In spite of the serious shortcomings, PL360
was a brilliantly conceived piece of work that had a
following of people who made amazing use of it: people
working with and under Wirth did Algol W in it, a
European group did Simula 67 using PL360, and others did
some amazingly efficient subroutine/function library
packages with it.

John.