C. H. Lindsey
ABSTRACT
ALGOL 68 is a language with a lot of “history”. The reader will hear of discord, resignations, unreadable documents, a minority report, and all manner of politicking. But although ALGOL 68 was produced by a committee (and an unruly one at that), the language itself is no camel. Indeed, the rigorous application of the principle of “orthogonality” makes it one of the cleanest languages around, as I hope to show. Moreover, when the language came to be revised, the atmosphere was quite different enabling a much more robust and readable defining document to be produced in a spirit of true cooperation. There are some lessons here for future language design efforts, but I am not optimistic that they have been learned.
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Index Terms
- A history of ALGOL 68
Recommendations
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Reviews
Doris Keefe Lidtke
This lengthy paper is well written, informative, and well documented with a helpful bibliography. The author became a member of the committee in August 1968, so he has first-hand knowledge of the activities. He relies heavily on the detailed minutes of the meetings. As one of the papers presented at the History of Programming Languages Conference earlier this year, this paper contributes to the quality of the proceedings. It is noteworthy that two of the people the author thanks for commenting on his manuscript had signed the Minority Report.
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