[HECnet] "IP protocols on DECnet'

[Paul Koning]

Algol 60 and Algol 68 are very different languages.  Algol 60 is very simple, and was implemented quite widely.  There is a PDP-11 version that apparently was derived from a PDP-8 implementation.  And the first Algol 60 compiler -- a FULL language implementation -- ran in just 4k 27-bit words (1961, Electrologica X1, by Dijkstra and Zonneveld).

Algol-68 adds structures (but not methods), and a bunch of other stuff.  It's a much harder language.  Lots of people did subset implementations; I know of a PDP-11 compiler (done by Carnegie-Mellon, no sign that it has been preserved).  A few were pretty complete; CDC actually had one as a commercial product for the 6000 mainframes, implemented by their Dutch office, most likely at the urging of CWI in Amsterdam.

It has been said that C++ was inspired by Algol-68.  If so, the lessons didn't come across well, no more than the Algol-60 lessons came across to the C designers.  And I wonder if it helped inspire Python.

Algol 68 does not have call by name.  But if you really want the equivalent you can pass a function as an argument.

	paul

> On Nov 8, 2021, at 2:18 PM, 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:
> 
> More consistency and verbs to avoid using a goto (like a return statement)
> 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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