Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!mordor!joyce!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-68 down for the count (was: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?)
Message-ID: <747@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 25 Nov 88 23:56:55 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <591@tuck.nott-cs.UUCP> <404@ubbpc.UUCP> <41111@ccicpg.UUCP> <1975@garth.UUCP> <5581@saturn.ucsc.edu>
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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.

You should have been given a copy of the article
"Algol 68 with Fewer Tears".  I forget the title, but it appeared in
the Computer Journal.  Shorter than the Algol 60 report, but covered
the main points.  There was a superb book "Premier Pas en Programmation"
which used Algol 68 as a first language; I was particularly taken with
the way the author managed to cover recursion simply and clearly before
he got to assignment.  The Lindsey & van der Meulen book "Informal
Introduction to Algol 68" has an introductory chapter "Very Informal
Introduction to Algol 68" which was pretty clear.  There was some good
introductory stuff for Algol 68R as well.

By the way, that's PL/I, not PL/1.  Now _there's_ a complicated language!
(IBM's Checkout and Optimising compilers implemented different languages...)