Algol(W) comes from the messy world of Algol standardization, has its tails in the early days of mainframe programming, before structured programming was fully

Algol(W) comes from the messy world of Algol standardization, has its tails in the early days of mainframe programming, before structured programming was fully crystallized, and the modern epoch. Pascal is a clean up of the early Algol efforts, with committee-designs removed for the service of CS students. What remained is an excellent academic language that increasingly had to bow to industry pressures to be "C-like". Original Pascal was compiled to byte-code, often interpreted, but by the 80s many Pascals had inline assembly language extensions, OS-specific hooks and other artifacts of systems programming. Modula is a much as Wirth's as type-theorists who really created its foundations, it's far bigger than a one man effort. Modula also saw tremendous funding & industry support, until it was "eclipsed" by Ada. Oberon is the Scheme-sized Algol dialect. It's a tiny little programming language, with its own tiny graphical operating system, tiny compiler, etc. Closest thing to an "AlgolM" (I'm sure he took more than a hint from the Lisp school.) Oberon is his meditation on the sublime .. something for future generations. I would love to see an Oberon Laptop Per Child.