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From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: He's not the only one at it again!
Message-ID: <58091@lanl.gov>
Date: 25 Jul 90 20:54:18 GMT
References: <25630@cs.yale.edu>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 50

From article <25630@cs.yale.edu>, by zenith-steven@cs.yale.edu (Steven Ericsson Zenith):
> In article <2400@l.cc.purdue.edu>, cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
> [...]
> |>  The extremely poor attempt to produce a machine-independent 
> |>computational language ALGOL was the followup.
> 
> This is an unjustifiable comment, since ALGOL has had a far more profound
> influence on the design of programming languages than either FORTRAN or
> COBOL.

Well yes, ALGOL _has_ had an enormous _negative_ impact on language
design (that still continues today).  Features like 'call-by-name' are
now recognized as bad by nearly everyone.  But, features like the
'compound statement,' which were found to be detremental to programmer
productivity in the mid-70s, are still widely thought (by non-designers)
to be a good idea.

In fact, as far as I can tell, the design of ALGOL can be divided into
three distinct groups of features:

1) Features that it shared with Fortran (so, for these features,
   Fortran is the "profound influence").

2) Features which are different, but completely irrelevant (like using
   ":=" instead of "=" for assignment).

3) Features which were later found to be a bad idea.  (Take a look at
   the ALGOL 60 'switch' some time.)

To be sure, later versions of ALGOL had some interesting things that
have had a lasting impact - _BUT_, none of these new things appear
to be original to ALGOL (such things as 'struct' data types, which
appear to be cleaned-up versions of features already found in other
languages (including COBOL)).

In fact, only two features, that I can find, are original to ALGOL and
have a continuing positive influence on language design: if-then-else
and while().  These are important, and I don't want to denegrate their
worth, but they aren't sufficient to warrant your conclusion about
the disproportionate worth of ALGOL.  The majority of ALGOL features
which have a positive impact on new language design were those that
ALGOL got from Fortran and other sources.

Now, having said all that, I will also say that ALGOL had a more
important impact in the early days by becoming the _lingua_franca_
of the international programming community.  This has nothing to
do with ALGOL as a programming language - it is a recognition of
its value as a publishing language.

J. Giles