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From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-68 down for the count (was: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?)
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Date: 25 Nov 88 21:51:46 GMT
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In article <5581@saturn.ucsc.edu> haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) writes:

>When Algol 68 was defined (by then I was using PL/1 a lot) all I could get
>was a book ten times as incomprehensible as the Algol 60 report.  And it
>was several years later before somebody might have had a compiler
>that I could have used; I didn't bother trying to find out.

Then you were very unlucky.  When Algol-68 came out, you could have
read Lindsay & van der Moelen's excellent "Informal Introduction to
Algol-68", which in my opinion is as lucid a language manual as any
programmer would ever wish to meet, with examples illustrating every
point made.

Within 15 months, you could have been programming in Algol-68 using
the excellent Algol-68R compiler from the Royal Radar Establishment.
This implemented all the language except the parallel processing
features, ran at high speed, and produced better code than the then
current Fortran IV compiler.  It also came with a "Users Guide" of
just 64 typed pages, which again was a model of clarity.  Its first
example is given on page 1:

	BEGIN
	  INT i,j;
	  read((i,j));
	  print(64/(i+j))
	END

which was the first Algol-68 program I ever got working, and it took
me an afternoon (10 minutes on the program and the rest spent finding
someone who could help me with ICL 1900 Job Control Language).

Within 24 months, you could have taken delivery of the Cambridge
University Algol-68C portable compiler, and had real fun.