🚀 go-pugleaf

yfcw14@castle.ed.ac.uk (K P Donnelly) writes:
> mo@messy.bellcore.com (Michael O'Dell) writes:
> >Learning Algol68 as a student did wonders for understanding other
> >languages, in particular, declarations in C.

I felt learning about Algol68 (can't say I learned it; we didn't have a
working compiler) did a lot for conceptual understanding.  It was one of
the cleanest languages in terms of [amount of power] relative to [number of
fundamental concepts] I've ever seen.  SO...

> Agreed!!  Why are we not using Algol68 now when it is so much better
> than other languages.  Is it, as I suspect, that people did not realise
> how good it was?...

That might be true, in a very real sense and for a very good reason:  It
was too hard to figure it out!  There was no K&R or Jensen&Wirth for it.
There was the _Informal_Introduction_..., which was a wonderful book (in
spite of the table of contents, which was a clumsy nuisance), but it didn't
really answer serious questions or lay down the law.  Then there was the
_Report_, which was nearly inscrutable, and the _Revised_Report_, which was
worse.  It took far too much initial study to be able to understand what
the report was saying, and it took far too much general familiarity to use
it to answer a question.  (Particularly in the revised report, chasing down
all the myriad productions sent you all over the language...and the worst
of it was that the simple concept "this is not allowed" was expressed as
giving you something to search for, which didn't exist!  If it came down
to MURF MORFETY FOOBLE REFFOOBLETY, and you couldn't find a definition for
that, it wasn't legal.)

>...Is it because it was bypassed by Pascal, which was
> designed as a teaching language but ended up being used for lots of
> things it was never intended for?...

Yes, another dose of reality:  Pascal was simple and it was implemented.
The implementation was widely available.  Therefore people used it.  It had
the necessary initial kick to start the positive-feedback loop.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...Relax...don't worry...have a homebrew.