4 ms·
> Just as Latin never actually died, just like COBOL, Algol 68, and Ada, – C++ is doomed to eternal half-existence between life and death. I'm almost afraid to
by npongratz 3y ago
> Just as Latin never actually died, just like COBOL, Algol 68, and Ada, – C++ is doomed to eternal half-existence between life and death.
I'm almost afraid to ask, but I'd love to know: are there any Algol 68 projects in active use? Anyone have war stories of maintaining them (bug fixes, new features, improvements to interface with more modern systems) in the last couple decades?
- zabzonk 3y agocertainly not active, but back in the 1980s i got dumped on a program that used algol, bcpl, fortran and cobol to drive a phototypesetter to do ... something. this took advantage of the fact that the dec10 allowed you to mix & match languages, much like the vax. i suppose i was lucky the idiot that originally wrote it didn't throw lisp into the pot. anyway, as i was hired as a microcomputer specialist, and as two dec10 systems programmers had ducked it, i simply said "no can do" - a valuable lesson. this is what i like about HN - recalling things i had completely forgotten!
- jamesfinlayson 3y agoA company I used to work had an Algol system running until 2005. A rewrite had begun in the 1990s and went live in 2001 and the two systems were run side by side until to make sure the new system was correct.
- JohnL4 3y agoPossibly. It was basically the native language of Unisys A-series mainframes and I guess those are still around in some form or other.
- jamesfinlayson 3y agoAh makes sense - I believe the Algol system I mentioned in another comment was running on a Unisys mainframe.