🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9168@castle.ed.ac.uk> 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.
Agreed!  The formalisms introduced with A68 are fundamental to
understanding any procedural (Von Neuman) language.

>Agreed!!  Why are we not using Algol68 now when it is so much better
>than other languages.  
It was also larger than other languages.  The only full compilers that I
knew of were larger than the IBM PL/I level G compilers, even though
they were a lot faster.
>                       Is it, as I suspect, that people did not realise
>how good it was?  
Partly - the references for the language were so abstruse that it was
very hard to learn the basics.
>                  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?  
Pascal was designed by Wirth after he got disgusted with the rapidly
growing size and complexity of the Algol68 effort.  I gave up in disgust
when the I/O subsystem became overspecified and bloated.  The other
thing that gave me heebie-jeebies was the use of _skip_ and _nil_ in
initialization positions -- the values actually assigned could be random
garbage that would not cause UNINITIALIZED VARIABLE errors, but would
make things not work.  Also the horror stories that my friends who were
implementing a full compiler told me made my hair stand on end.  In
fact, the stories are very similar to the ones I heard about Ada.  The
overloaded operators, partial parametization, and array slices explored
the very horizons of computer science capability.
>                                   Is Algol68 being used anywhere now?
I will be snide and say that the spirit of Algol68 now lives on
in the Ada programming language.  Many of the features are present in
Ada, some of them emasculated (procedure variables are gone), some of
them horribly present (overloaded operators, tasking); some of the nice
features are there as well.
>
>   Kevin Donnelly


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Bob Dalgleish		bobd@zaphod.UUCP