Standardization
Language standardization began in April 1966 in Europe with ECMA TC10. In 1969 ANSI established a "Composite Language Development Committee", nicknamed "Kludge", which fortunately was renamed X3J1 PL/I. Standardization became a joint effort of ECMA TC/10 and ANSI X3J1. A subset of the GY33-6003 document was offered to the joint effort by IBM and became the base document for standardization. The major features omitted from the base document were multitasking and the attributes for program optimization (e.g. NORMAL and ABNORMAL).
Proposals to change the base document were voted upon by both committees. In the event that the committees disagreed, the chairs, initially Michael Marcotty of General Motors and C.A.R. Hoare representing ICL had to resolve the disagreement. In addition to IBM, Honeywell, CDC, Data General, Digital Equipment, Prime Computer, Burroughs, RCA, and Univac served on X3J1 along with major users Eastman Kodak, MITRE, Union Carbide, Bell Laboratories, and various government and university representatives. Further development of the language occurred in the standards bodies, with continuing improvements in structured programming and internal consistency, and with the omission of the more obscure or contentious features.
As language development neared an end, X3J1/TC10 realized that there were a number of problems with a document written in English text. Discussion of a single item might appear in multiple places which might or might not agree. It was difficult to determine if there were omissions as well as inconsistencies. Consequently, David Beech (IBM), Robert Freiburghouse (Honeywell), Milton Barber (CDC), M. Donald MacLaren (Argonne National Laboratory), Craig Franklin (Data General), Lois Frampton (Digital Equipment), and editor, D.J. Andrews of IBM undertook to rewrite the entire document, each producing one or more complete chapters. The standard is couched as a formal definition using a "PL/I Machine" to specify the semantics. It was the first, and possibly the only, programming language standard to be written as a semi-formal definition.
A "PL/I General-Purpose Subset" ("Subset-G") standard was issued by ANSI in 1981 and a revision published in 1987. The General Purpose subset was widely adopted as the kernel for PL/I implementations.
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