[HECnet] "IP protocols on DECnet'

[Rob Jarratt]

I wish I could find the port of Algol68C to the PDP10. I occasionally ask, but there is no trace of it ☹

 

From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> On Behalf Of Paul Koning
Sent: 08 November 2021 19:31
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] "IP protocols on DECnet'

 

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 <mailto: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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