On Monday, 1994-10-03  Jacob Warner wrote to David Noon about "Pl/I"
as follows:

JW> I have received Personal Edition PL/I and installed it and have
JW> barely tried it out. Am disappointed that no .exe program is
JW> stand-alone but requires about 1.5 Meg runtime support. The CP/M
JW> PL/I compiler produced stand-alone programs. This is a much more
JW> complete version of PL/I however. I feel as if I have to learn the
JW> language all over.

Hi Jake,

The language has been enhanced somewhat, hasn't it?

I think the reason IBM chose to use DLL's all the way is because the
compiler was originally targetted at the corporate market. IBM didn't
think many "personal" users would want such a huge language. In a
corporate environment you have many programs currently active on a LAN
and by using DLL's you have only one copy of the support routines
occupying disk space, memory on each requester and to be maintained.

Just like you, I would like to see the ability to create a
self-contained .EXE, even though I would never use it on my own
machine. However, you don't have to bundle all the support routines
with each program. A utility in the toolkit called EXEHDR, when run in
verbose mode, will tell you which DLL's are used by a given .EXE, and
you simply include just those ones. Not every program uses the full
1.5MB; in fact virtually none, unless you go overboard with the
language's features all in one program.

Also, IBM has chosen quite judiciously which support routines should
be statically linked and which should be loaded dynamically. [I.e.
small, frequently-used routines are statically linked; bigger,
less-frequently used ones are pulled in dynamically.] Furthermore,
preparing your own DLL's is a breeze. Check out the FETCH and RELEASE
statements; FETCH has been ehanced over even the MVS implementation.

If you think 1.5MB of DLL's is a lot, be thankful you didn't buy the
professional edition - it has an extra 300K or so of DLL's because of
DB2/2 and CICS support.

Regards

Dave

 * KWQ/2 1.2g * Taligence: (adj.) The property of being Pink. (cf. "Floyd")
--- Maximus/2 2.01wb