Introduction to PL/I Programming and PL/C

Introduction to PL/I Programming and PL/C (1973) by Marilyn Bohl & Arline Walter Science Research Associates ISBN: None (because ISBNs were clearly optional when the future was being invented) Condition: Good (as sold by Crappy Old Books) There was a time?gather round?when programming meant courage. Not clicking ?Run,? not importing libraries, but feeding your intentions into a machine that occupied the moral and physical space of a small bungalow. Introduction to PL/I Programming and PL/C hails from that heroic age: 1973, when the Cold War was simmering, disco was warming up, and someone somewhere was convinced that PL/I would unify the computing world forever. PL/I (Programming Language One) was IBM?s grand attempt to combine the serious business of scientific computing (FORTRAN) with the respectable clerical orderliness of COBOL. Why have one language when you can have all of them, at once, with options? This book is your calm, pedagogical guide through that noble ambition. Marilyn Bohl and Arline Walter take you by the hand?firmly, sensibly?and introduce you to declarations, data structures, condition handling, and the subtle art of persuading a mainframe not to sulk. There is something deeply reassuring about the tone: no hype, no ?disruption,? no tech-bro evangelism. Just structured logic and the quiet promise that if you follow instructions precisely, the machine will obey. PL/C, for those unfamiliar, was the kindly training-wheels compiler for PL/I, designed so students could make mistakes without bringing down the entire computing department. In other words: the original ?safe mode.? Condition-wise, this copy is in good shape. Clean, solid, readable. It has the dignified composure of a textbook that has seen students wrestle with semicolons and survived. No drama. No syntax errors in the margins. Just vintage computing confidence. Ideal for: Retro-programming enthusiasts Historians of the mainframe age Anyone who believes modern coding is too forgiving Collectors of languages that once promised everything Reading this today is both humbling and oddly empowering. You realise that before GitHub and Stack Overflow, before autocomplete and cloud deployment, there were people learning to think like machines with nothing but paper, pencil, and a compiler that may or may not cooperate. This is not nostalgia for nostalgia?s sake. It?s a reminder that computing once required patience, structure, and the ability to wait for a printout. Crappy Old Books is proud to present this portal to the era when code was capitalised, storage was measured in awe, and the future arrived on punched cards.…