After some weeks playing with old FORTRAN programs and converting them into PL/I on my Z80 singleboard (SB) computer (kit from CPUVille), I can say without reservation that I quite love PL/I.

The language is now dead, and that’s a shame. It certainly is one of the true ‘structured programming’ languages of the 20th century, and definitely fit in with the horrid old ‘waterfall project development’ life cycle. However, the language itself is quite lovely.

I took many of my old Engineering FORTRAN programs from the ’80s and had them running in F77 on the Z80 SB. They worked almost exactly as they had in the 80s, though quite a bit slower (Z80 vs. CDC Cyber or Honeywell Multics). The speed difference between Z80 and a modern Intel I7 PC using the same F77 compiler was astounding.

But it wasn’t until I converted them to PL/I that I found the PL/I programs, while about the same speed of compile/link/execute were just… nicer. From an aesthetic standpoint, the structure of the PL/I programs was clean and … nice. But the things that set PL/I apart from F77 were the file IO, and the outputs. File IO in FORTRAN works, but was messy. File IO in PL/I was simple and clean. The F77 documentation for Z80 wasn’t any help either. I ended up reaching out to online forums for assistance getting F77 file IO to read CP/M named files. Once I got the ‘trick’, it was easy. But in PL/I, the documentation was clear, easy to follow, and correct.

Even with both IO systems working, the output was where PL/I really shone. Fortran has several format specifiers for real number output, but PL/I outshines Fortran on every level.

The output from my FORTRAN programs was … nice. The same output from my PL/I programs was beautiful. Now in full disclosure, the F77 compiler would not accept the ‘T’ (or Tab) format specifier, so I had to resort to counting spaces. The PL/I formatted output accepted ‘Column(x)’ and made it so much easier.

I found no fundamental difference in double precision implementations in the two compilers, and both were easy to use once you learned how.

However, I still really enjoyed writing the PL/I programs. It was just a lot of fun and very satisfying.

Now on to new things…