Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[ROGER GRAYDON CHRISTMAN]

Actually, FORTRAN and COBOL and Algol (for its control structures)
Trying to support both of the first two was entertaining --
when you declared a variable, it wasn't enough to say it was an Integer:
you had to also declare whether it was represented in Binary or Decimal,
and also specify the desired precision.

The IBM/360 architecture supported both binary and decimal integers,
where the decimals were stored as BCD nybbles of arbitrary fixed length
(as opposed to binary integers matching the machine word size)

The world migrated away from PL/I back in those days because of
the one-size fits none consequences of trying to do everything.
So I always find myself looking askance when language designers
try to repeat the exercise.

You know, like designing a largely-interpreted object-oriented
language with libraries supporting a functional programming style.
I think I've seen a language like that somewhere around this forum.

But I like it anyway

Roger Christman
Pennsylvania State University

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 12:07 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>
On Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:21:46 -0400, Bill <BILL_NOSPAM at whoknows.net>
>declaimed the following:
>
>>PL-I has already been taken.  That is a pretty free-wheeling language 
>
>	I think I once heard PL-1 described as trying to combine FORTRAN and
>COBOL...
>
>
>