[HECnet] "IP protocols on DECnet'

[Keith Halewood]

Thankfully, the call by name complexity of Algol 60 was briefly available as ‘proceduring’ in the draft of Algol 68 but removed for the revised report…. thankfully.

I can’t believe how straightforward Algol 68 is to parse and resolve with modern techniques and today’s resources.

On 8 Nov 2021, at 19:18, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing at gmail.com> wrote:



Indeed, one wonders about the focus on Call by Name and all that thunky stuff.  I can't remember off hand where I needed Jensen's Device, although everybody did agree it was a cool think.  On the other hand, the thunk could get expensive.

At the time, there was far focus on control flow than data structures.  So programming Algol 60 (on the 10) is not that much different from C in many, many respects, except:

  1.  More consistency and verbs to avoid using a goto (like a return statement)
  2.  Non-atomic data structures or records (struct's)

The ALGOL STAR game had to do some gymnastics to pick data into ints into order to track players which would have been completely unnecessary had C been used.

But this was 1974 on Long Island; nobody had heard of C or Unix.  I'm not sure if it was out of the lab in any significant way by then.

On 11/8/21 1:59 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 11/8/21 1:45 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
One of my best friends in High School and during my undergraduate years (shortly after the invention of electricity) was positively an Algol 68 _fanatic_.  I don't think I ever saw him without that green and white ACM magazine issue with a focus on Algol 68 which he would whip out at a moment's notice.  Sometimes it seemed that he thought that a sneeze could best be expressed in Algol 68.

  Nah...really, you need C for that.

             -Dave

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