Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: C machine
Message-ID: <478@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 18 Dec 87 05:26:24 GMT
References: <7535@alice.UUCP> <133@babbage.acc.virginia.edu>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 17
Summary: why bring Algol 68 into it?

In article <133@babbage.acc.virginia.edu>, mac3n@babbage.acc.virginia.edu (Alex Colvin) writes:
> Finally, I like to think of C as the apotheosis of Algol 68.
"apotheosis", n, deification, act of raising any person or thing
	      to the status of a god.
Algol 68 was a very nice language which let you do all sorts of
things that are important for clear and correct coding (like
dynamically sized arrays, heap allocation that didn't force you
to kick type-checking good-bye) including a number of things
that ANSI C is finally reinventing (prototypes, several sizes
of float).  There is nothing in C (other perhaps than the keywords
'int' 'void', 'struct' and the *word* "cast" -- which means something
utterly different in Algol 68) resembling Algol 68.  It would be
more accurate to describe C as the ANTITHESIS of Algol 68.

Relevance to this discussion:  there was at least one machine
which ran Algol 68 as its "native" language.  I think it was built at
RRE in the UK and was called FLEX.