4 ms·

This really does take me back, as I was a graduate student under J.E.L. Peck (though I didn't actually work on his compiler) back around 1970. I have always fel

This really does take me back, as I was a graduate student under J.E.L. Peck (though I didn't actually work on his compiler) back around 1970. I have always felt that ALGOL 68 (he insisted on the block caps) was undervalued as a programming language; it was harmed by its impenetrable specification (two-level grammars are a clever idea, but horrible for actual understanding), and the absolutist ideas of the compiler writers (the standard complaint about any short-cuts was “what if we have a left bracket, 50 pages of code, and the matching right bracket”, as though that was actually something somebody would do. The lack of a concrete syntax also harmed it: different implementations spelled the “begin” keyword as BEGIN, 'BEGIN, and .BEGIN. Goodbye portability! And finally, ALGOL 68 learned from ALGOL 60's failure to include an I/O library: they did a splendid job on their transput library. Unfortunately, it is record-oriented (as were most mainstream OS file systems of the time) at just the moment when Unix was about to popularize the byte-stream file abstraction. I really wish that an ALGOL 68-style language had been successful, even given these mistakes (when you do a radical rethink of programming languages, you are bound to make mistakes). There was even at least one machine-oriented ALGOL-68 style language named Mary, which might have been a good replacement for C. It's good to see that at least some work on implementation continues.

Taniwha 4y ago
I'm sure you remember that at the time it was written people were still trying to figure out what a computer language should look like - also most people at the time only had upper case (card punches) The whole how do we use keywords in compilers (and in multiple languages)? how do we represent types? was all still something people were thinking through - in retrospect the two cases thing for parts of the language was a mistake, as was the 2 level grammar spec
- vincent-manis 4y ago
  There were literally hundreds of languages around when the ALGOL 68 effort started, so there was lots of experience to draw from. Both the lack of concrete syntax and the 2-level grammars were disputed at the time, and one might remember that Wirth and Hoare designed ALGOL W as a reaction against the ALGOL 68 effort. (I liked both languages, silly me.) My original comment was not intend as snark against the ALGOL 68 designers, but rather to point out that the language had a lot going for it, even with these serious flaws. But as is often the case, we learn more from mistakes than successes.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    When I was reading the ALGOL working group archives, the impression that I got was that Wirth and Hoare designed (what would later be called) ALGOL W as a candidate proposal for ALGOL X, the latter being what would eventually evolve into ALGOL 68.
    - vincent-manis 4y ago
      A number of eminences in the ALGOL 60 world strongly resisted the philosophy behind ALGOL 68, and spoke up vehemently against the direction that the language was going in. Wirth and Hoare were indeed developing ALGOL X (W comes before X), while what is now ALGOL 68 was ALGOL Y. The X supporters vehemently opposed the direction in which Y was going, and many of them, including Wirth and Hoare, disassociated themselves from the whole enterprise. At that point, the X project was essentially dead (though it's possible to consider Pascal as its immediate successor). By the way, I want to praise C. H. Lindsey, whose “Informal Introduction to ALGOL 68” rescued the language from indecipherability and showed that there was a useful language lurking inside. A lot of this history is lost now. I heard bits and pieces of it in my time on the periphery of the UBC ALGOL 68 project circa 1970-5. The Wikipedia articles on ALGOL W and 68 also hint at it.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Much has been saved, too, although finding it is not always easy. FWIW most of my research was based on the stuff here, but mostly focused on ALGOL 60: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/algol/algol_bulletin/ https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/algol/alg...
int_19h 4y ago
> The lack of a concrete syntax also harmed it: different implementations spelled the “begin” keyword as BEGIN, 'BEGIN, and .BEGIN. Goodbye portability! It's not all downsides, though. Due to Algol (both 60 and 68) treating keywords as abstract symbols, it made it possible to translate those keywords to other languages. This was done in USSR, for example, and made Algol much more accessible to programmers there. (I know there were similar experiments elsewhere in Europe; not sure if they were quite as successful, though.)
- vincent-manis 4y ago
  Yes, in my youth I used Grenoble ALGOL 60, in which one said 'DEBUT'...'FIN' around a block. There was also something called Socialist ALGOL 60, which was apparently used widely in eastern bloc countries.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Soviets had quite a few different ALGOL 60 and 68 dialects, but I don't recall seeing anything resembling that name when digging through the history of it. It sounds more like an informal name of some dialect, or perhaps all the Eastern Bloc dialects collectively? BTW the ability to translate the language had some other interesting consequences; apparently, they found that ALGOL 68 was sufficiently expressive to design what we would now refer to as DSLs, for applications varying from CNC to accounting. The end users of those languages would be even less likely to know English, of course.
    - vincent-manis 4y ago
      To be honest, I don't recall when I was told about Socialist ALGOL; to the best of my knowledge, it was somebody at one of the ALGOL 68 workshops that were held back then, but I can't recall who. And I suspect that the official name of this dialect would not have been “Socialist ALGOL” anyway. The idea was that it would unify all the ALGOL 60 dialects in use around the east bloc. (And yes, I'm familiar with the saying that if you replace n ways of doing the same thing with one, you end up with n+1 ways of doing the same thing.)

Taniwha 4y ago

I'm sure you remember that at the time it was written people were still trying to figure out what a computer language should look like - also most people at the time only had upper case (card punches) The whole how do we use keywords in compilers (and in multiple languages)? how do we represent types? was all still something people were thinking through - in retrospect the two cases thing for parts of the language was a mistake, as was the 2 level grammar spec

vincent-manis 4y ago
There were literally hundreds of languages around when the ALGOL 68 effort started, so there was lots of experience to draw from. Both the lack of concrete syntax and the 2-level grammars were disputed at the time, and one might remember that Wirth and Hoare designed ALGOL W as a reaction against the ALGOL 68 effort. (I liked both languages, silly me.) My original comment was not intend as snark against the ALGOL 68 designers, but rather to point out that the language had a lot going for it, even with these serious flaws. But as is often the case, we learn more from mistakes than successes.
- int_19h 4y ago
  When I was reading the ALGOL working group archives, the impression that I got was that Wirth and Hoare designed (what would later be called) ALGOL W as a candidate proposal for ALGOL X, the latter being what would eventually evolve into ALGOL 68.
  - vincent-manis 4y ago
    A number of eminences in the ALGOL 60 world strongly resisted the philosophy behind ALGOL 68, and spoke up vehemently against the direction that the language was going in. Wirth and Hoare were indeed developing ALGOL X (W comes before X), while what is now ALGOL 68 was ALGOL Y. The X supporters vehemently opposed the direction in which Y was going, and many of them, including Wirth and Hoare, disassociated themselves from the whole enterprise. At that point, the X project was essentially dead (though it's possible to consider Pascal as its immediate successor). By the way, I want to praise C. H. Lindsey, whose “Informal Introduction to ALGOL 68” rescued the language from indecipherability and showed that there was a useful language lurking inside. A lot of this history is lost now. I heard bits and pieces of it in my time on the periphery of the UBC ALGOL 68 project circa 1970-5. The Wikipedia articles on ALGOL W and 68 also hint at it.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Much has been saved, too, although finding it is not always easy. FWIW most of my research was based on the stuff here, but mostly focused on ALGOL 60: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/algol/algol_bulletin/ https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/algol/alg...

int_19h 4y ago

> The lack of a concrete syntax also harmed it: different implementations spelled the “begin” keyword as BEGIN, 'BEGIN, and .BEGIN. Goodbye portability! It's not all downsides, though. Due to Algol (both 60 and 68) treating keywords as abstract symbols, it made it possible to translate those keywords to other languages. This was done in USSR, for example, and made Algol much more accessible to programmers there. (I know there were similar experiments elsewhere in Europe; not sure if they were quite as successful, though.)

vincent-manis 4y ago
Yes, in my youth I used Grenoble ALGOL 60, in which one said 'DEBUT'...'FIN' around a block. There was also something called Socialist ALGOL 60, which was apparently used widely in eastern bloc countries.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Soviets had quite a few different ALGOL 60 and 68 dialects, but I don't recall seeing anything resembling that name when digging through the history of it. It sounds more like an informal name of some dialect, or perhaps all the Eastern Bloc dialects collectively? BTW the ability to translate the language had some other interesting consequences; apparently, they found that ALGOL 68 was sufficiently expressive to design what we would now refer to as DSLs, for applications varying from CNC to accounting. The end users of those languages would be even less likely to know English, of course.
  - vincent-manis 4y ago
    To be honest, I don't recall when I was told about Socialist ALGOL; to the best of my knowledge, it was somebody at one of the ALGOL 68 workshops that were held back then, but I can't recall who. And I suspect that the official name of this dialect would not have been “Socialist ALGOL” anyway. The idea was that it would unify all the ALGOL 60 dialects in use around the east bloc. (And yes, I'm familiar with the saying that if you replace n ways of doing the same thing with one, you end up with n+1 ways of doing the same thing.)