Hacker News Reader

Interesting--what is PL/X used for these days? I worked briefly with what might be similar PL/5 which was a derivative of XPL for writing systems programs for the Sigma 5 series of computers.

View on HN

As far as I know, the only place PL/X is still used is inside z/OS, though I could be wrong.

Is it an assembly-language replacement, like a high-level assembler?

Not really, I suppose I'd describe it as a low-level language like C, combined with syntax which would be familiar to anyone who has used REXX. You can do things like splits in python to refer to a subset of an array, and it has a single loop macro, which is similar to ALGOL68's 'for'. Also, it has dummy sections, which are kind of like structs, except they can be associated with a specific pointer. So, rather than saying 'Employee->name' to refer to the structs name field, you just say name, and it knows which pointer it is based off of. You can tie many of these pointers together and it will follow them automatically, which is very useful, although it can get confusing.

That said, it does have high-level-assembler features, like being able to directly declare and modify registers. Pl/X also features a way to directly insert assembly code using a GENERATE macro, in which you have to specifically declare which registers/variables are either modified or referenced.

All-in-all, it's not a bad language; I prefer it to C.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com