PL/I list processing

The concepts of list processing have been introduced into the PL/I language. With these new facilities, it is possible to write PL/I procedures that operate on simple and complex data list organizations. Most list-processing languages have suffered from their inability to deal directly with complex data structures and/or from their inability to perform the complete range of programming language operations upon the data list structures. These two problems have been eliminated in the list-processing facilities of PL/I. The basic concepts of list processing and the philosophy of the PL/I language extensions are discussed. In addition, several detailed list-processing examples are provided.