Structured Programming Languages: ALGOL, PL]I, Turing, Atlas Autocode, Rapira, Comal, ALGOL 60, Block, QBASIC, PL]0, Xpl, ALGOL W, PL]M, Sp]k  (English, Paperback, LLC Books, LLC Books, Source Wikipedia)

Chapters: Pl/i. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 109. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: PL/I ("Programming Language One", pronounced "pee-el-one") is a procedural, imperative computer programming language designed for scientific, engineering, business and systems programming applications. It has been used by various academic, commercial and industrial users since it was introduced in the 1960s, and is actively used as of 2010. PL/I's principal domain is data processing; it supports numerical computation, scientific computing, recursion, structured programming, linked data structure handling, character string handling, and bit string handling. The language syntax is English-like and suited for describing complex data formats, with a wide set of functions available to verify and manipulate them. In the 1950s and early 1960s business and scientific users programmed for different computer hardware using different programming languages. Business users were moving from Autocoders via COMTRAN to COBOL, while scientific users programmed in FORTRAN. The IBM System 360 (announced in 1964) was designed as a common machine architecture for both groups of user, superseding all existing IBM architectures. Similarly, IBM wanted a single programming language for all users. It hoped that FORTRAN could be extended to include the features needed by commercial programmers. In October 1963 a committee was formed composed originally of 3 IBMers from New York and 3 members of SHARE, the IBM scientific users group, to propose these extensions to FORTRAN. Given the constraints of Fortran, they were unable to do this and embarked on the design of a new programming language labeled NPL". This acronym conflicted with that of the UKs National Physical Laboratory and was replaced briefly by MPPL and, in 1965, wit...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=23708