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All programming languages have a number of words that have special meanings in that language. These are known as reserved words and they can only be used in the appropriate parts of the programming code where they are intended by the language to be used. Trying to use a reserved word for something else will sometimes cause an obvious error and the rest of the time will cause a not so obvious error. Here is a reference to those words that have a special meaning in PL/1.

PL/1 Statement Reference

Whether you are using Cobol or PL/1 the calls that you make from a batch program to an IMS database will be almost the same. This reference page lists all of the parameters you need to pass to the call along with the values that can be used for many of those parameters and what those values mean.

IMS Calls

PL/1 unlike many other programming languages provides direct access to define and call program interrupts. In this article we look at how it is done.

PL/1 Interrupts

I spent over twenty years programming mainframe computers using either Cobol or Pl/1 (depending on where I was working at the time). As a result, when I set up my computer help site,, a large section of the site was dedicated to answering mainframe questions.

With the outsourcing of most of the mainframe programming jobs to India I found myself unable to find more mainframe work a few years ago and have since moved on to other things. The mainframe section of the site is still one of the few sources of information about mainframe computers on the web and I still regularly get questions (mostly from people in India) about how to do various things with mainframes.

I still have a number of mainframe books in my collection and so am able to look up some of the information that I can no longer directly remember in order to be able to answer most of those questions.

Mainframes