Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cs.utexas.edu!ico!nbires!maa
From: maa@nbires.nbi.com (Mark Armbrust)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.intel
Subject: Re: PLM vs. C for 80286/80386
Keywords: PLM C
Message-ID: <409@nbires.nbi.com>
Date: 8 Jun 89 16:55:08 GMT
References: <598@philtis.UUCP> <126@tridom.uucp>
Reply-To: maa@nbires.UUCP (Mark Armbrust)
Organization: NBI Inc, Boulder CO
Lines: 30

In article <126@tridom.uucp> wht@tridom.uucp (Warren Tucker) writes:
>
>5.  PL/M is inherently a strongly typed language.  It is
>very hard to screw up the number and type of parameters
>supplied to a function, etc.  This might be a good thing for
>what you are trying to accomplish.  Passing a variable
>number of arguments to some function like printf is nice,
>but having the facility all over the language is why
>function prototyping and lint were invented.

It's been a while since I've used PL/M, so I may not have the syntax
quite right, but you can implement variable arguments by passing pointers:

call Printf ("format string", @(arg1, arg2, etc));

The biggest thing I missed in PL/M is the pointer op "->".  This op is available
in PL/1 and I always wondered why it was dropped from PL/M.  I wish I had a dime
for every time I wrote:

temp = dir$ptr;
dir$ptr = some$other$ptr;
(do something to dir)
dir$ptr = temp;


-- 

Mark Armbrust
maa@nbires.nbi.com
maa@nbires.UUCP