Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!apollo!perry
From: perry@apollo.HP.COM (Jim Perry)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: PL/I and Reserved Words
Keywords: PL/I keywords
Message-ID: <4666d281.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 23 Oct 89 16:16:00 GMT
References: <2958@usceast.UUCP> <4560@bd.sei.cmu.edu> <465396f5.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> <6614@ficc.uu.net>
Sender: root@apollo.HP.COM
Reply-To: perry@apollo.HP.COM (Jim Perry)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Apollo Division - Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 22

In article <6614@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <465396f5.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> perry@apollo.HP.COM (Jim Perry) writes:
>> point out that nobody's ever held an "obfuscated PL/I contest" or written 
>> a "PL/I puzzle book".  
>
>If there were as many PL/I programmers as C programmers, then this might
>change. But PL/I doesn't run on any interesting machines, and hasn't for
>many years.

Substitute any sufficiently common programming language you choose, e.g.
BASIC, PASCAL, or FORTRAN, only C (and APL) of common programming languages
lends itself by design and convention to intentionally cryptic and
maximally terse coding.  There were, in its time, plenty of PL/I programmers,
it's just not the trendy language today.

I'll take exception with "doesn't run on any interesting machines"; I'll
grant you that there's no UNIX implementation that I'm aware of, and that
may have killed it.
-
Jim Perry   perry@apollo.com    HP/Apollo, Chelmsford MA
This particularly rapid unintelligible patter 
isn't generally heard and if it is it doesn't matter.