In alt.folklore.computers "John H. Lindsay"
<jlin_DELETE_THIS_SPAM_ZOT_dsay@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>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,
Not knowing the particular language; but speaking up in its defense
anyway: Most languages (such as C) use a pre-compiler to implement
macros; running a shell around the actual compiler. Sometimes
completely different languages (Pascal, C, BASIC or even Assembler) have
used the exact same precompiler to implement macros, includes, and
various library functions before passing on the "full" or "expanded"
version to the actual compiler that produces either object-code or
sometimes assembly-language-code to be passed on to an assembler that
produces the actual machine-code.
There's no reason such a shell couldn't be used with this one.
> 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.
>
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