[prirun]

I'm not promoting the PL/I language, although I did do significant work with it back in the day, including the Prime operating system which had huge chunks written in a system-programming version of PL/I. PL/I likely never "made it" because it's a huge, bloated language that's hard to implement, compilers were scant, and they were expensive. For the curious, here are Prime's 2 system-programming subsets, the first, PL/P, is from 1978:

PLP: https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/prime/pet/pe-t-483%20PLP%201... SPL: https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/prime/pet/pe-t-xxx%20SPL%20R...

I am promoting the concept of strings having a built-in capacity and current length, and the language compiler and runtime understanding that rather than trying to use a byte array as a string. Even compiled BASIC I used in the late 70's had real strings like that.