4 ms·

I said this on another forum recently. There were good reasons for rejecting ALGOL 68, both because of the language's complexity, and because of the incomprehen

I said this on another forum recently. There were good reasons for rejecting ALGOL 68, both because of the language's complexity, and because of the incomprehensible 2-level grammars of the Report. (Disclaimer: my grad supervisor was one of the editors of the Report, and I did a small amount of ALGOL68-related work then.) Languages like Oberon exemplify simplicity; at a different abstraction level, so does Scheme. But the complexity battle has been lost: for example, C++ is arguably far more complex than ALGOL68.

angiosperm 3y ago
And correspondingly more useful. The lesson of Wirth's speech is that it is hard to get people to give up what is useful.
zik 3y ago
I was interested to check how various languages compare in complexity to ALGOL 68. As a rough proxy for complexity let's look at the number of pages in their language specifications (excluding glossaries, examples, libraries, etc.): * ALGOL 68 spec: 209 pages * C: 418 pages * C++: 457 pages * Python: 148 pages (but doesn't include a lot of things in PEPs) * Rust: doesn't have a specification but does have a 600 page book * Lisp: 48 pages * Go: 109 pages Some of these have more detail than others - the C spec is very detailed and the Go one is clearly intended to be more human readable than detail oriented. Also I've excluded core library specs here and they add a lot to some of these specs, but arguably some are "more core" than others so they're not really comparable.
tgv 3y ago
The 2-level grammar may have been hard to read, but the language wasn't that hard to explain. Well, REF REF was, but the rest was pretty straight-forward. I do agree that Pascal is easier to explain. OTOH, C was much harder. CS and EE students seem to have an intuitive grasp of pointers, but others need to be told to be very careful with them and follow strict rules.

angiosperm 3y ago

And correspondingly more useful. The lesson of Wirth's speech is that it is hard to get people to give up what is useful.

zik 3y ago

I was interested to check how various languages compare in complexity to ALGOL 68. As a rough proxy for complexity let's look at the number of pages in their language specifications (excluding glossaries, examples, libraries, etc.): * ALGOL 68 spec: 209 pages * C: 418 pages * C++: 457 pages * Python: 148 pages (but doesn't include a lot of things in PEPs) * Rust: doesn't have a specification but does have a 600 page book * Lisp: 48 pages * Go: 109 pages Some of these have more detail than others - the C spec is very detailed and the Go one is clearly intended to be more human readable than detail oriented. Also I've excluded core library specs here and they add a lot to some of these specs, but arguably some are "more core" than others so they're not really comparable.

tgv 3y ago

The 2-level grammar may have been hard to read, but the language wasn't that hard to explain. Well, REF REF was, but the rest was pretty straight-forward. I do agree that Pascal is easier to explain. OTOH, C was much harder. CS and EE students seem to have an intuitive grasp of pointers, but others need to be told to be very careful with them and follow strict rules.