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From: dhoyt@vx.acs.umn.edu (DAVID HOYT)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol68
Message-ID: <3628@ux.acs.umn.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 91 20:45:01 GMT
References: <3787@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU> <chl.668272227@m1> <1991Mar8.202516.10401@praxis.co.uk> <PCG.91Mar9211601@aberdb.cs.aber.ac.uk> <YV6O4AC@math.fu-berlin.de>
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In article <YV6O4AC@math.fu-berlin.de>, dww@math.fu-berlin.de (Debora Weber-Wulff) writes...
>Why is Algol 68 not being used? Well, it seems to have every feature
>ever needed, and is thus rather difficult to read and learn. Tony
>Hoare wrote about "The Emperor`s New Clothes" a while back, in which
>he politely explains why less is better. 

  I suspect it has more to do with IBM, which pretty actively (in the USA
atleast) discouraged people from using it.  They invented PL/I as the
language to use (in place of Algol).  So people started using PL/I.  When
everyone noticed that PL/I only ran on expensive IBM hardware, and that
Fortran was the only language that ran on everything; they bagged PL/I and used
Fortran.  Algol survived for a while in Europe (Siemans, ICL and others
outsold IBM for a while there), but after a while Algol programmers noticed
that you couldn't write programs for nice IBM, DEC, etc. mainframes and
mini's, so they too started writing programs in Fortran.  In the USA Cobol
was an option for some, and more recently C is the language to end all
languages.  Ada has replaced PL/I and Algol as 'the language with a
feature for everybody.'  It even runs on more than one vendor's machine as
the trillion dollar DoD specifies it in most contracts these days.

  david | dhoyt@vx.acs.umn.edu | dhoyt@umnacvx.bitnet