Re: Re: Pragmatic Requirements Summary : update

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Eric Merritt wrote:

>  PL/I is still used just not much. I am pretty sure that one-to-
> allness wasnt the only thing wrong with PL/1

No.  But it was the only language I could think of besides C and assembly 
that has had (more or less) successfull OSs written in it (Multics).  And 
it was the first language- that I'm aware of- that was advertised as being 
all things to all people.

One of the things that killed PL/I- and is killing C++ IMHO- is the
multiple subsets problem.  A problem Pragmatic is already flirting with
from my view of this maillist.  Here's the thing- PL/I was a really huge
language, large enough that basically no programmer could remember the
whole thing.  So programmers coded in various subsets- unfortunately
everyone didn't code in the *same* subset.  So you'd get two programmers
working on two projects supposedly in the same language not being able to
understand each other's code because they were coding, and knew, disjoint
subsets.  Or worse yet two programmers on the *same* project working in 
disjoint subsets and not being able to maintain each others code 
(increasing the truck factor of the project).

Brian



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