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 wa

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.