IBM PL/S Machine-oriented programming language [pdf]

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21 pointsIAmPaigeAT5 comments

I wonder what their reason was to keep this language private. Or for creating the language in the first place, when they already had a PL/1 compiler. (Maybe the full PL/1 compiler was to large to run gracefully on their lower end machines?)

I think https://wiki.c2.com/?PlsLanguage is informative. PL/S was more suitable for writing low-level code due to some extra options and it didn't need a full runtime environment. Wikipedia suggests IBM didn't (initially) release it because it meant that only they could alter the operating system, and also to avoid handing any advantage to their competitors.

Correct. We used PL/S for the RSS, which was the lower layer of System R, the first SQL database. See https://mcjones.org/System_R/ and https://mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/index.html

Eww. This looks like COBOL v0.5. Or something. It makes me want to cry.

Nope. It's straight out of PL/I, which is a highly underrated compiler language.

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