User talk:RogerofRomsey

I am a beginner in Wiki, but not in PL/I. Comments are welcomed. RogerofRomsey (talk) 14:37, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

PL/I Article
Having worked on defining PL/I from 1965 till 1972, I replaced the Introductory and Goals sections yesterday, to more accurately and completely explain the origins of PL/I. User RossPatterson backed-out all my changes overnight. I am happy to change my contribution in response to any issues RossPatterson has with my entry. I was unable to find any explanation in his or my talk pages.

RogerofRomsey (talk) 12:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry, it was an error on my part. I used a tool ("rollback") intended for handling article vandalism, which this edit appeared to be.  You're right, the rest of the edits (which rollback reverted en massse) were much more appropriate.  Now that I've read the text more closely, I think you meant "CLDC was pronounced kludge by some members", although it didn't make sense at first.


 * Happy editting, and thanks for adding to the article! RossPatterson (talk) 13:54, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the explanation. I'll fix the Kludge sentence.

RogerofRomsey (talk) 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Today I am adding the Summary of the Language, in several chunks RogerofRomsey (talk) 17:28, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I have broken the Implementation section into four subsections, adding the D compiler to the subsection on PL/I F Compiler, and adding a subsection on the Optimizer and Checker. RogerofRomsey (talk) 17:48, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

A lot of detailed format improvements, and some inaccuracies fixed. RogerofRomsey (talk) 16:26, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

I have put a comment into the new, anonymous, section called "On-block error trapping" pointing out that there is a serious technical error - the section refers to leaving an ON-unit with a RETURN statement. This was disallowed in PL/I because of the dynamic inheritance of ON-units; RETURN in an ON-unit would need to terminate different procedures in different circumstances, further complicating the job of compiling PL/I. The particular aspect of ON-units raised by the item is that of exceptions raised in ON-units and the use of " " in an ON-unit to avoid an infinite regress where ERROR raises ERROR which raises ERROR... Perhaps the item should be broadened to ON-units and exception handling in general, as PL/I has distinctive features in this area. RogerofRomsey (talk) 16:46, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree about ON units, they caused a lot of confusion to early users such as myself who barely knew the meaning of recursion. When I discovered that ON statements were executable rather than declarative, I concluded they were definitely a design aberration. Be that as it may, I still wanted at least one feature that turned out to be unaffordably inefficient when it eventually arrived. That must have been before I realised the vital necessity of KISS.
 * We met at Hursley, by the way, when I was a member of a small group of customers including RR, ICI, Kodak and, for a time, Nielsens(?). I even have a son who worked at Hursley for a time. He got his 25 year award before they made him redundant. Sykes is the name. MikeSy (talk) 12:02, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

PL/I Question
Roger – I’m trying to find a PL/I expert to answer a question – and from your user page you look to be as expert as they come. I hope you don’t mind me firing this at you, but I suspect you know the answer off the top of your head and unfortunately I’ve not managed to dredge up any useful information from IBM. In a CICS environment where all procedures need to be REENTRANT, one obviously cannot use STATIC storage, as concurrent threads will trample over each other, but is it viable to use CONTROLLED storage, especially in a sub-module ? IE if I call a submodule multiple times, allocating a new CONTROLLED storage instance each time, will ALLOCATED storage be quarantined to each individual thread or will allocations from concurrent threads be interleaved in the CONTROLLED storage stack ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by MarkTB (talk • contribs) 12:11, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Sorry - I left PL/I before the CICS project came to Hursley. Roger

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