3 ms·
"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of ALGOL 60. He
by sampo 4y ago
"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques
that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of
ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only
an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors."
- C.A.R. Hoare in 1974 in "Hints on programming language design"
https://www.cs.yale.edu/flint/cs428/doc/HintsPL.pdf https://www.cs.yale.edu/flint/cs428/doc/HintsPL.pdf
- int_19h 4y agoI would actually disagree with that - call-by-name is very much an anti-feature, for example, as are goto-labels-as-function-arguments. And, at the same time, crucial features such as pointers were missing. OTOH Algol 68 is a whole different story, and for all its weirdness (much of which is terminological - "transput" for I/O, "mode" for type etc), its extreme orthogonality and consistency is very elegant.