[HECnet] Thrashing about...

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:19 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net>
wrote:

>
> Program managers have to estimate the business case for anything they do,
> and it's an imperfect science.
> ​....
>  In general ALGOL is no harder than PASCAL
> ​.
>
​I agree - Algol60 might have been fairly easy compared to some other
things, I suspect it was cost benefit, resources applied/ROI.​

​ I'm not so sure of Algol​
​68.  The impression I get from the languages folks is that Algol68 was
becoming just not that interesting to 'enough' customers (Paul W's comment
above about it being primarily just the Brits pushing DEC for it by then).
  Also, Algol (Algol60 if you will) and Algol68 are pretty different in
scope. There were numerous Algol60 flavors for the -8 and -10, and as you
say; they are no harder than Pascal. [As I recently noted elsewhere, there
is slick multiuser Algol60 running on TSS/8 in 4K for simh/pdp-8].

The Pascal Report was created post Algol68 and in some ways was Wirth
simplification of -68 which had caused great consternation in the languages
community when the Algol-68 report was released.   Pascal language
definitely had a fast following and DEC marketing picked up on that
invested and in it for the 32 and 36 bit systems [the 16 bit compiler was
from OMSI/Oregon Software, not our friends in ZKO].     I suspect, by the
time Pascal shows up DEC Marketing figured that the need for other
languages (like PL/1, RPG and Cobol) was more important than Algol68 and
the need for pure Algol60 was less and less for Vax since pretty much
anyone using Algol60 by then had transitioned to Pascal - so the cost
benefit/return favored Pascal and not Algol68.  I personally can not say
(But .. I'll ask if any of them remembers though).

FWIW: The Stanford MainSAIL folks created a company did port the Stanford
AI flavor of Algol to the Vax for both VMS and UNIX, plus to different
68000/UNIX systems of the mid-1980s and they brought some of the Algol-ish
folks with them.  I've seen that compiler kicking around the Internet also.

Again, as I said, it is a good question for that group what they remember.
​
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