Editing PL/I (section)

===Significant features developed since the standard===
Several attempts had been made to design a structure member type that could have one of several datatypes (<code>CELL</code> in early IBM). With the growth of [[Class (computer programming)|classes]] in programming theory, approaches to this became possible on a PL/I base{{snd}} <code>UNION</code>, <code>TYPE</code> etc. have been added by several compilers.

PL/I had been conceived in a single-byte character world. With support for Japanese and Chinese language becoming essential, and the developments on International Code Pages, the character string concept was expanded to accommodate wide non-ASCII/EBCDIC strings.

Time and date handling were overhauled to deal with the [[Y2K problem|millennium problem]], with the introduction of the DATETIME function that returned the date and time in one of about 35 different formats. Several other date functions deal with conversions to and from days and seconds.