I worked in PL/1 for 4 years. Saying it is just "F&%ing works" made me laugh hard! The compilation never failed because the compiler assumed what you really wanted. I got many bizarre programs.
Must have had an odd code base then - I found it nice to work with.
And in my experience Primes pl1/g Compiler did properly assume what a sane developer would want - well there was that one time I had to recompile the entire Pl1 part of our MR system and push it out to all 17 systems :-)