Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol 60 vs Algol 68 (was "stack machines (Burroughs)")
Message-ID: <130@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jun 88 03:19:33 GMT
References: <1521@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1532@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <476@pcrat.UUCP> <1188@unisoft.UUCP> <949@gethen.UUCP>
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Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <949@gethen.UUCP> isaac@gethen.UUCP (Isaac Rabinovitch) writes:
>I understand that Wirth thought Algol 68 was a
>disaster, but was overruled by the rest of the committee.

Not the whole of the committee.  There was a "Minority Report".
Ah, if only the committee had heeded the concerns of the Minority Report;
we might have had ADA _years_ earlier (:-).

>He then went
>off and did Algol W, Pascal, and Modula, languages which use concepts he
>couldn't sell to the Algol 68 commitee.

Algol W came *before* Algol 68.  There are no concepts in Algol W or Pascal
that I can think of that aren't in Algol 68, and the main concept in Modula
(did you mean Modula or Modula-2? they are quite different) not in Algol 68
is modules.  The irony of it all is that Pascal is significantly crippled
with respect to Algol W.

The essential ideas of Algol 68 were that the whole language should be
precisely defined and that all the pieces should fit together smoothly.
The basic idea behind Pascal was that it didn't matter how vague the
language specification was (it took *years* to clarify) or how many rough
edges there were, as long as the CDC Pascal compiler was fast.