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◈ALB Atlas

PL/I Maintenance

PL/I
KindProgramming language
Appeared1964
StatusMaintenance
CreatorIBM / SHARE committee
FamilyALGOL
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

IBM's attempt to merge scientific, business, and systems programming into one language — Multics was written in it, and IBM still ships an optimizing compiler.

Influenced by FORTRAN COBOL ALGOL 60
Created by IBM

PL/I (1964) — IBM's attempt to merge FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL into one universal language for System/360 — was the most ambitious language design ever attempted by a committee. Multics was written in it.\n\nIt is notoriously big, famously hard to parse, and still shipping on z/OS; PL/I's 'everything' lesson is why every subsequent language chose restraint.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I