About Consultancy Development Contact Blog /.navbar-collapse Toggle nav Obscure Languages And Chef Resource Notifications 03 September 2013 A lifetime ago in Internet years I had the good fortune of writing code for the largest data migration ever undertaken in the UK at that point in time between two of the largest banks in the country. It was a mixture of IBM S/390 mainframe assembler and an obscure IBM language called PL/1 . PL/1 defined data structures using the DCL statement. A typical array declaration might look like this: DCL THINGS ( 1, 2, 3, ) CHAR(1); Given the nature of the systems that I was working on (bank core accouting and ledgers) code reviews were detailed, per-statement per-line and undertaken multiple times by multiple groups before code made it anywhere near the production systems. Looking at the declaration above, one might be...