PL/I was an order of magnitude step from Fortran and Cobol. The earlier languages made direct calls to the operating system while PL/I used subroutine librairie

PL/I was an order of magnitude step from Fortran and Cobol. The earlier languages made direct calls to the operating system while PL/I used subroutine librairies to do the operating system heavy lifting. The library routines in many cases would produce messages of various utility (usually with the number of the failing statement) instead of causing the application to terminate aka ABEND. Yes, you can use bit strings in PL/I, but the subroutine overhead was ginormous. This is simply the worst case of PL/I data conversion routines. PUT EDIT and GET EDIT are somewhat less costly. Structures are a two edged sword. Best to have them STATIC in the owning routine and have them based on pointers for other routines. Otherwise the prolog code can dwarf the code that does useful work. PICTURE works very well in structures. Assigning between structures with fields of the same name in one PICTURE, and the other in machine format can often be performed without resort to data conversion routines. Bottom line: Many advertised features are costly while PL/I offers remarkably efficient alternatives.