I've now spent some time with the MS Fortran-80 compiler and its documentation, and I've got it running pretty well. It took me a bit to remember how carefully a fortran program source has to be formatted, but I think I've got it now.

Remember, fortran was originally meant for punched card input (and sometimes output), and it's format is closely tied with punched cards. Or at least that's so for Fortran IV - I think Fortran 77 and later made the source code more format-free.

This version is almost identical to the one I used in 1976 when I was studying engineering, and it's really fun to play with.

That said, I also downloaded and installed Digital Research PL/I. This is a traditional PL/I compiler for CP/M, and it also seems to work fine under SIMH.

For those not familiar with it, PL/I is a block structured, procedural programming language that loosely falls in the Algol-like category, with Algol 68 and Pascal. Pascal is its direct descendant. For those that remember it, the Multics operating system (the father of Unix) was written in PL/I. For more information on PL/I, check out the wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I

I've uploaded the SIMH PL/I disk image and the DR programmers and reference manuals in pdf format. You can find it in the Documents folder. It also includes lots of sample code, which seems to compile and run just fine.

If you download and play with it, let us know of your successes!