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Date:	Wed, 7 May 2008 16:19:08 -0700
From:	"Gregory W. Smith" <gsmith@well.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: SL/I ?

Content Type: text/plain

On Tue, 29 Apr 2008, John H. Lindsay wrote:
> Hi Lynn et al. (whoever al is ...):
>
> You wrote:
> > ................ a full SL/I implementation. ................
>
> I've only picked up on odd bits of your interesting project here,
> so I may have missed the definition of SL/I as you are using
> it for this project. What are you calling SL/I ? Is there a defining
> document, or is it not yet pinned down that far ? I know of one
> definition (a follow-on to PL/S), and have heard of other uses of
> the name although I can't point to any written material describing
> them.
>
> TIA,
>
> John.

John,
By now you might have come to the realization that the SL/I
of the Developer's Assistant/Warpicity is the flying unicorn of
programming languages. Take one horse (the PL/I part), glue on
the horn (the APL part), and tape on the wings (the logic engine
from Prolog.)
Nothing new, but a thing of beauty and great magical power that
will make a single programmer the match of a team of hundreds
(or dozens) of mere mortal programmers.
In a nutshell:
NO LRM (language reference manual),
NO set of syntax diagrams,
NO BNF grammar, and
NO semeantic specification.

But we are resourceful: We can get a PL/I manual. Then get an
APL manual -- THEN staple them together and our workhorse
(PL/I), now has a horn (APL). Now find your Prolog manual and
staple that to the stack and we have the wings (the logic
engine.)

And now we are off to look at Lisp, APL, and FORTH. So
now we can staple FORTH and Lisp specificaions to our stack
of documents.

So... No defining document that we can hand to a team of
compiler/interpreter writers. But we do have this stack:

PL/I ANSI INCITS 53-1976 (R1998)
APL INCITS/ISO 8485-1989 (R2005)
Prolog INCITS/ISO/IEC 13211-1-1995 (R2007) and
INCITS/ISO/IEC 13211-2-2000 (R2006)

And we also have

Lisp ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (R1999)
FORTH ANSI INCITS 215-1994 (R2006)

All of these are formal standards, so they will go
together with no trouble at all..... Just a little
bit of editing. As soon as we have the master LRM,
we can then translate it all into SL/I.

That leaves the repository/database of the Developer's
Assistant. We ALMOST have that licked. A lot of diagrams
have been presented at SCOUG meetings. Now we just have
to get the diagrams into some database schema....

-- Greg Smith
--
Gregory W. Smith (WD9GAY) gsmith@well.com

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