Did anybody reading this ever use PL/M?

Consider

It included features targeted at the low-level hardware specific to the target microprocessors, and as such, it could support direct access to any location in memory, I/O ports and the processor interrupt flags in a very efficient manner. PL/M was the first higher level programming language for microprocessor-based computers and was the original implementation language for those parts of the CP/M operating system which were not written in assembler.

and

Many Intel and Zilog Z80-based embedded systems were programmed in PL/M during the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, the firmware of the Service Processor component of CISC IBM AS/400 was written in PL/M.

I wonder what became of it...

 

I recall using CP/M, I believe also developed by Gary Kildall.

 

PL/M, PL/0, PL/1.

I loved PL/1 - just felt right.

 

PL/M, PL/0, PL/1.

I loved PL/1 - just felt right.

PL/I was a strong language, the full IBM standard was quite elaborate though and implementing compilers for the standard was far from easy. The subset 'G' became an ANSI standard and was more compact and I implemented 90% of a working compiler for it (in C !) on Windows NT which is now gathering dust here.

As a systems programming language it was much more of an engineers language than say C, and was used to develop Multics the first multitasking virtual memory OS ever written in a high level language.

It had a bit data type, as will as fixed length and varying length strings, fixed point and floating point decimal and binary (yes, fixed point binary and floating point binary) types. The fixed decimal was packed BCD.

The fact is PL/I was goal driven and designed and reviewed and so on, before being developed and that is one of the reasons it was relatively free of idiosyncrasies. ambiguities and hacks.