fun with PLI, was Where should the type information be

You do? It's not in my ANSI PL-I standard. If we get to add vendor extensions, then my language can always beat your language.

Maybe the PL-I programmers you know are smarter than the ones I knew, but I always found the conditions too baffling to use except in very simple and stylized way, set and EOF flag to test later or abort on error. And I don't think I'm the only one who feels that way. One of the reasons that IEEE floating point has NaNs is so that you don't have to deal with a possible trap after every operation but still have a way to check for exceptions when you're done.

It was about 35 years ago, but as I recall I was doing something which was a counter mostly intended for I-O and I figured that it'd be easier to keep it as a string. I later realized that a picture would do what I wanted, but that's part of the camel-ness of PL-I, you have pictures from Cobol, and strings with numbers in them sort of from Fortran, and they sort of act the same and sort of don't.

Yeah, it has its charms, but it's a sprawling mess, sort of like C++ but sprawling in different directions.

Like I said in my first message, considering that it was a hack job 40 years ago PL-I is a surprisingly good language. It's not the worst language I've ever used, not the best, but it's got enough problems of its own that the only reason I'd tell someone to use it now is if there's a project with an embedded code base to modify or start from.

I've always claimed that any language where you can write I = I + 1 is a dialect of Fortran, and none of them are different enough to be worth worrying about.

Regards,