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From: hirchert@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FORTRAN horrors
Message-ID: <50500045@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 5 Apr 88 20:15:00 GMT
References: <584@auvax.UUCP>
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Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert    Apr  5 14:15:00 1988


>Soo, how come PL/1 never became more popular (at least in North
>America - it did become fairly popular in Europe where it was designed).

>Tony Willis

Different people will give you different answers, but the thing that soured a
lot of people on PL/I in this environment was its arithmetic rules.  In 
attempting to combine the arithmetic rules of FORTRAN and COBOL, PL/I often
produced nasty and unintuitive results.  The classic that I remember was the
statement
   DO I = 1 TO 10/2;
The details are more than I want to present here, but the result was that
10/2 was converted to FIXED BINARY(31,34), shifting all significant bits off
the end of the word and causing the loop not be executed at all.

Except for this kind of arithmetic problems, I was usually able to live
comfortably with the fact that I didn't know (or want to know) all of PL/I.

Even if the arithmetic were fixed, I probably wouldn't choose PL/I today
because its pointers are weakly typed and I find that a bit too dangerous for
my tastes.

Kurt W. Hirchert     National Center for Supercomputing Applications