kevin Abel wrote:Peter,
I went to the link and I see a lot of information about PL1 but not the simple looking words I mentioned. I'm wondering if they are something else. It looks like PL / ORACLE but I don't know why the keywords are not in the documentation.
Kevin
PL1, also known as PL/1, PL/I, Programming Language/1*, was a language developed by IBM in the later 1960s (I think). It was an attempt to create a "universal" language for their mainframe computers. Prior to that, languages tended to be more specialized: Fortran for scientific computing, COBOL for business computing. PL/1 syntax was more like the formulaic Fortran than the verbose COBOL, but it supported some of the hardware data types that COBOL allowed but Fortran did not (for example, BCD-style arithmetic). It was one of the first major languages to adapt to the new-fangled "structured programming" model that became an essential part of OOP.
It wasn't as popular as Fortran and COBOL (both of which were available for free from IBM, where PL/1 was not), but it did see some commercial use. I worked with it at my first computer job, in fact. It had an optimising compiler (extra-cost) product back when most compilers were non-optimising.
Fred Brooks held it up as a systems programming language in his seminal book
The Mythical Man-Month and IBM did, in fact develop a dialect of it called PL/S that was used to write much of the IBM OS/VS operating system code. PL/S was closer to the hardware (vanilla PL/1 code couldn't operate in the specialised internal environment of an operating system). And, alas, for those of us doing OS-level coding outside of IBM, they wouldn't share it. We spent literally years trying to find a suitable equivalent.
As a side note, the Prime Computer company (perhaps best noted for using Dr. Who as a spokesman) had originally designed their hardware to optimally run Fortran, but Fortran has certain limitations such as not being originally designed as a structured programming language nor easily adaptable to that paradigm, so in the 1980s, Prime adapted a dialect of PL/1 to be the new systems programming language for their OS products. Unlike IBM, they made it available for free to customers.
PL/1 syntax was almost certainly influenced by Algol, though Algol was never very popular in the USA. And from thence we get C and finally
Java.
SQL does have primitive a PL/1-like syntax. which wouldn't be surprising since SQL has roots at IBM and IBM has a fairly consistent model for all of the language-like products that they produce such as OS system utilities.
However, having said all that. PL/1 is not PL/SQL nor SQL and any overlaps in keywords between them are purely incidental.
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* IBM apparently liked the name so much that they also copyrighted PL/2 through PL/99 for future use.
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