Yes, I completely agree that the real problem of ALGOL-68 has been the complete lack of suitable documentation for it. Even if Wirth is the author of some impo

Yes, I completely agree that the real problem of ALGOL-68 has been the complete lack of suitable documentation for it. Even if Wirth is the author of some important innovations in programming language design, all his programming languages have been significantly inferior to ALGOL-68. Nevertheless, most of them have been more successful precisely because Wirth has written some simple and clear manuals for them, which were easily understood by any programmer. The formal description used in the report about ALGOL-68 could have been very useful for implementers, but because the language included a lot of novelties it never had any chance of adoption without having, besides a formal description, an extensive tutorial and rationale of the design, accompanied by many programming examples. This is very sad, because ALGOL-68 got a lot of things right, which are wrong in most later programming languages, but because of its reputation of being incomprehensible it has been very seldom a source of inspiration for the designers of programming languages, as it would have deserved. Some popular languages, including C, the Bourne shell and C++, have taken various elements from ALGOL 68, but most of them have been superficial elements, like keywords or details of syntax, instead of taking more important elements. For instance among the ALGOL 68 elements borrowed by C is the keyword "union", but the unions of C are barely better than the EQUIVALENCE of Fortran, and they are not comparable with the unions of ALGOL 68, which were based on the proposal of John McCarthy and which correspond to what are now more frequently called sum types. The "variant records" of Pascal were also much worse designed by Wirth than the unions introduced earlier in the ALGOL 68 that he had criticized.