rsc@merit.edu (Richard Conto) (04/11/90)
In article <148@garth.UUCP> phipps@garth.UUCP (Clay Phipps) writes: >[The following thread has been abducted from "comp.lang.c":] > >>In article <KZB#G{_@rpi.edu>, >>night@pawl.rpi.edu (Trip Martin) wrote: >>> >>> An interesting note [...] is how Plus, a little-known language [...], > ^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^ >If you refer to the Programming Language for UNIVAC Systems (PLUS), >I can understand why it might be "little-known". Many contemporary >readers of this news-group probably assume that UNIVAC was a manufacturer >of vacuum-cleaners (or whatever they are called Across The Pond). Well, presuming that the fellow from rpi is familiar with MTS, I think that the language "Plus" he refers to is not the UNIVAC language. (I think that since RPI does have an MTS system, that Trip is familiar with the MTS version.) I don't know if the MTS Plus has any relationship to the UNIVAC Plus. The manual for the language claims descent from Pascal and "Sue". (Sue was a language developed at the University of Toronto around 1971.) The MTS Plus also claims influence from C. Plus has two looping constructs... the "cycle" <statement-list>; "end cycle" construct, which is a basic infinite loop that can be exited with a "return", "exit", or "goto" statement, and a "do" construct (like the FORTRAN DO or the Pascal "for" statements.) The "exit" statement is like C's "break" statement, although you can "exit" to a a particular level, by using labeled looping statements. I happen to like Plus better than C because it is more strongly typed. (It allows "procedure types", which can be included as fields in arrays or structures, which makes it a kind of object oriented language I suppose.) I also like Plus because it has a real concept of strings, with string operators built into the language. (But it doesn't let you define your own operators as C++ can.) I also like the Plus compilers because they do a lot of checking that lint would do for me seperately. I like to think it keeps my code a bit more manageable.... --- Richard Conto (rsc@merit.edu or Richard_Conto@ummts.cc.umich.edu)