A history of ALGOL 68

  • Authors:

  • C. H. Lindsey

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • HOPL-II The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

ALGOL 68 is a language with a lot of “history”. Thereader will hear of discord, resignations, unreadable documents, aminority report, and all manner of politicking. But although ALGOL 68was produced by a committee (and an unruly one at that), the languageitself is no camel. Indeed, the rigorous application of the principle of“orthogonality” makes it one of the cleanest languagesaround, as I hope to show. Moreover, when the language came to berevised, the atmosphere was quite different enabling a much more robustand readable defining document to be produced in a spirit of truecooperation. There are some lessons here for future language designefforts, but I am not optimistic that they have been learned.—Author's Abstract