Xref: utzoo comp.lang.misc:7112 comp.arch:21687 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!herald.usask.ca!zaphod!bobd From: bobd@zaphod.UUCP (Bob Dalgleish) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.arch Subject: Re: Algol68 Message-ID: <4202@zaphod.UUCP> Date: 27 Mar 91 15:22:49 GMT References: <1991Mar11.123405.17814@bellcore.bellcore.com> <9168@castle.ed.ac.uk> Organization: Develcon Electronics Limited,Saskatoon, SK, Canada Lines: 44 In article <9168@castle.ed.ac.uk> yfcw14@castle.ed.ac.uk (K P Donnelly) writes: >mo@messy.bellcore.com (Michael O'Dell) writes: >>Learning Algol68 as a student did wonders for understanding other >>languages, in particular, declarations in C. Agreed! The formalisms introduced with A68 are fundamental to understanding any procedural (Von Neuman) language. >Agreed!! Why are we not using Algol68 now when it is so much better >than other languages. It was also larger than other languages. The only full compilers that I knew of were larger than the IBM PL/I level G compilers, even though they were a lot faster. > Is it, as I suspect, that people did not realise >how good it was? Partly - the references for the language were so abstruse that it was very hard to learn the basics. > Is it because it was bypassed by Pascal, which was >designed as a teaching language but ended up being used for lots of >things it was never intended for? Pascal was designed by Wirth after he got disgusted with the rapidly growing size and complexity of the Algol68 effort. I gave up in disgust when the I/O subsystem became overspecified and bloated. The other thing that gave me heebie-jeebies was the use of _skip_ and _nil_ in initialization positions -- the values actually assigned could be random garbage that would not cause UNINITIALIZED VARIABLE errors, but would make things not work. Also the horror stories that my friends who were implementing a full compiler told me made my hair stand on end. In fact, the stories are very similar to the ones I heard about Ada. The overloaded operators, partial parametization, and array slices explored the very horizons of computer science capability. > Is Algol68 being used anywhere now? I will be snide and say that the spirit of Algol68 now lives on in the Ada programming language. Many of the features are present in Ada, some of them emasculated (procedure variables are gone), some of them horribly present (overloaded operators, tasking); some of the nice features are there as well. > > Kevin Donnelly -- -- * * * Remember: I before E except after DALGL * * *-- Bob Dalgleish bobd@zaphod.UUCP