PL/I

Joyce, James. "Extension to PL/I For Natural-Language Processing. " Computers and the Humanities 6.5 (1972): 271-276. Web . Raskin, Jeffrey S. "Programming Languages for the Humanities. " Computers and the Humanities 5.3 (1971): 155-158. Web . Sowa, Cora Angier and John F. Sowa. "Thought Clusters in Early Greek Oral Poetry. " Computers and the Humanities 8.3 (1974): 131-146. Web . Wachal, Robert S. "The Machine in the Garden: Computers and literary scholarship, 1970. " Computers and the Humanities 5.1 (1970): 23-28. Web . Rice, Sandra. "Software Review: INQUIRER III (Edinburgh Edition) A Computer Based System for Content Analysis. " Computers and the Humanities 10.6 (1976): 332. Web . PL/I (Programming Language/One) is an early programming language developed by IBM for their 360/370 machines (Oakman 155). It was a multipurpose language adaptable for business analysis, scientific data processing and character handling (155), and could handle data stored on magnetic tape or on disks (Heller and Logemann 24). It was commonly available due to both wide adoption of IBM's equipment, and other companies like Honeywell and General Electric followed IBM's lead in making the language available on their machines (Oakman 155). PL/I was commonly used for natural language processing within the Humanities, second only to FORTRAN for language processing applications due to its wide availability (Joyce 271). By 1972, PL/I was used on 40% of such projects, with FORTRAN coming in at 50% (271), and scholar James Joyce considered PL/I the better suited of the two languages as it accommodated business data in its design, rather than the strictly formula-oriented scientific bent of FORTRAN (271). Humanities programmers are concerned primarily with symbolic data as opposed to numbers. They wish to manipulate sentences and texts, or strings of their own notations...We observe that PL/I allows data to take the form of strings of symbols. Thus in a PL/I program one can generate any desired text or coding schemes, and move and save strings for accumulating dictionaries and preparing output text. Moreover, PL/I provides the essential minimum of operations on strings of symbols. (Heller and Logemann 21) Joyce, James. "Extension to PL/I For Natural-Language Processing. " Computers and the Humanities 6.5 (1972): 271-276. Web .