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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Re: Assembly VS HOL: Having it both
Message-ID: <1295@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 17-May-85 14:33:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.1295
Posted: Fri May 17 14:33:11 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 19-May-85 01:08:32 EDT
References: <417@wdl1.UUCP>
Organization: Duke U Comp Ctr
Lines: 25

>       The idea of machine-dependent medium-level languages was worked to death
> in the late 60s and early 70s.  Look up ``PL/360'' in a good computer science
> library.  In retrospect medium-level languages were a bad idea; nothing more
> machine-dependent than Bliss ever went anywhere.
> 					John Nagle

I've seen PL/360 and I believe it still has some users at Stanford; at
least you could still get documentation from them as recently as about
three years ago.  IBM today uses a machine-dependent "medium-level" (one
might argue about that in this case) language called PL/S for its
operating systems nowadays, though I don't believe this is quite as
powerful as what I have in mind.  And I repeat that Burroughs large
systems have no assembler but use instead a dialect of Algol.  So the
idea is not quite as dead as all that.

If problems were found using these languages, what were they?  Was it
really that, say, PL/360 was unusable, or was it inertia or
unavailability that caused the problem?  In short, if they're better
than assemblers, why not use them, and if they're not as good, what is
it that keeps them from being as good?
-- 
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-3695
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