Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!mips!murphy
From: murphy@mips.COM (Mike Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: PL/I and Reserved Words
Keywords: PL/I keywords
Message-ID: <30366@gumby.mips.COM>
Date: 30 Oct 89 20:01:19 GMT
References: <2958@usceast.UUCP> <4560@bd.sei.cmu.edu> <465396f5.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> <6614@ficc.uu.net> <4666d281.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> <10994@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> <467175a4.183dc@apollo.HP.COM>
Reply-To: murphy@mips.COM (Mike Murphy)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 14

>>In article <4666d281.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> perry@apollo.HP.COM (Jim Perry) writes:
>>>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.

I'm not going to defend PL/I, but I want to point out that there are some 
UNIX implementations of it.  One implementation is on the MIPS machines,
which are RISC UNIX boxes.  However, it is true that PL/I compilers are 
not as widespread as C or Pascal compilers; that's probably because PL/I 
compilers are harder to write.  There's a cyclic problem here in that 
complicated languages are less likely to be implemented, and fewer 
implementations mean fewer users which means fewer implementations....  
To overcome this hurdle you need a strong initial demand for the language 
(as Ada has because of DoD mandates).