Excerpted from message dated 10-10-94, David Noon to Murray Lesser:

DN>How's the PL/I coding coming along? Did you unload the Visual PL/I
  >from the Dev Conn CD too?
  >

Hi Dave--

    Very slowly.  Couldn't find the book by Vowells still in print, but
found a 3rd edition of "PL/I Structured Programming" by Joan Hughes
(1986) still available.  $55 (ouch!).  After wading through the
obligatory chapter on structured programming, decomposition, etc (all
nonsense, of course) we are now getting into the meat.  I can see that
REXX was derived largely from PL/I!

    In the meantime, I have written a REXX utility that improves on
Borland's version of TOUCH, and am writing it up for possible
publication in _PC Techniques_.  (I use a touch-like utility to
time-stamp all the files on the diskette I submit to the publisher, to
the same value.)  Mine allows arbitrary input dates and times, and
doesn't die when it hits an "access denied" file in the midst of a
wild-card expansion.  Most of it consists of validity checking of the
arbitrary date and time, and making sure the diskette in the drive is
readable and not write protected.  (Easy in REXX--with a little help
from an "external function" DLL; hard when I did it for DOS in C; looks
potentially easy in PL/I--may use my "softer touch" as the PL/I
"learning program."

    Didn't unload the visual PL/I because (a) I write text-mode
utilities, only, mostly for my own amazement, and (b) I have never
gotten over the habit of writing and testing programs in little chunks,
from the command line.  I discovered multitasking was the way to do it
with DesqView 386.  OS/2 makes it even easier.

    I'll get around to asking for help one of these days.  Don't go
away.

               --Murray
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