RainCode's PL/1 practice

RainCode's PL/1 practice is our answer to the technical and strategic issues related to this language. It is a set of products and services that address the various evolution paths one can take with PL/1.

A complex technical issue

PL/1 is a very complex language, from all possible point of views:

• Lexical
• Syntactical
• Semantics
• Preprocessor

Things are only made worse by the fact that there are a number of dialects, making porting from one compiler to another (even from the same vendor) a non-trivial task.

More than technical only

Beside the technicalities per se, PL/1 also raises a number of serious strategic issues:

• Two truly active vendors, one discontinues support for older versions, and the other is milking the cow
• Porting a PL/1 system to a different platform is getting hazardous.
• Finding PL/1 competences is getting increasingly difficult.

A range of possible solutions

Confronted to this increasingly complex and critical situation, RainCode's PL/1 practice can offer a number of solutions:

Normalization and mass-change, to port from one PL/1 compiler to another, or even, between two releases of the same compiler. Reachability analysis, to reduce a portfolio to the programs that are actually used. After a feasibility assessment, automated migration to another language (COBOL, C or .NET, depending on the system at hand) Business rules extraction

Need more information?