Re: acronym PL/I (Formerly Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?)

[je@unix.brighton.ac.uk (John English)]

Anthony Gargaro (abg@sei.cmu.edu) wrote:

: In article <9412070053.AA05549@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu>, Paige Vinall <vinall@VNET.IBM.COM> writes:
: |> The official name is PL/I (as specified by the ANSI standards).  It
: |> stands for "Programming Language One".  The "I" is a roman numeral.
: |> Using an arabic one is incorrect.  Before PL/I, it was briefly called
: |> NPL for "New Programming Language" but the acronym conflicted with Net
: |> Propulsion Laboratory.  "PL/1" is incorrect but used so heavily that I
: |> don't bother correcting people.

: Another issue with the acronym NPL was that it conflicted with the National
: Physical Laboratory (NPL, Teddington, UK). This was more significant, if I
: recall correctly, because the first PL/I compiler was developed at Hursley
: Park near Winchester (England).

I also seem to remember that IBM toyed with MPPL (Multi Purpose Programming
Language) for a while but deemed it too ugly, and that when they finally
gave up trying to think of a nice name and plumped for PL/1 they copyrighted
PL/2 to PL/100 just to be on the safe side (but not PL/M or PL/360 :-)

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