{"id":11010,"date":"2025-06-27T01:01:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T05:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=11010"},"modified":"2025-07-08T14:44:04","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T18:44:04","slug":"thinking-about-algol-68","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=11010","title":{"rendered":"Thinking about Algol 68"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\r\n \r\n <\/i>\r\n <\/a>\r\n 3 <\/span>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n

In memory of J. Kevin Douglas, a good friend and fellow fan of Algol 68<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I took my first computer science course in my second year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The course was a full year, starting in September 1974, and we programmed in Waterloo FORTRAN IV, which if memory serves was called Watfor or maybe Watfiv at the time. We also had a brief session with IBM 360 \/ 370 Assembler language. Both languages were available to us in the form of batch timeshare services where we wrote our programs on IBM 029 key punches and submitted the card decks to be run, generating printouts which were almost entirely compilation or execution failures interspersed with the occasional output of a program that generated the hoped-for results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In sum, things were pretty basic \u201cback in the day\u201d. Nevertheless I kept at it and in my next and subsequent years as an undergrad had access to interactive terminals and many other programming languages, including PL\/1, Pascal, BCPL, LISP, Algol W, APL\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 And Algol 68.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My friend and fellow student Kevin Douglas, who was much more of a computer scientist than I will ever be, introduced me to Algol 68. There were graduate students at UBC working on Algol 68 implementations. Professor J.E.L. Peck, an Algol 68 luminary and member of the committee in charge of designing the language<\/a>, was head of the department.  While my interests in computer science tended more toward numerical analysis, what I perceived as the sheer expressiveness of Algol 68 was a powerful distraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the language itself – said to be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to compile due to its innovative two level grammar, and yet at the same time astonishingly elegant for its orthogonality and resulting expressive nature – who could not fall under the charms of  that?  Finally, let\u2019s all face it – if the main goal of a new computer language is to make it easy to compile into machine code, then we\u2019d all still be writing in assembly language.  Or maybe something like PL\/360<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it turns out, Algol 68 accomplished two main things beyond all the design and implementation efforts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. It influenced, to some degree at least, the design of many subsequent languages and utilities, including C and the Bourne shell;<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. It created a legion of opposing parties, who not only sat on the sidelines heckling, but in some cases, built really useful things to show that there were other ways to proceed, including the Pascal and Ada programming languages.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Fast forward to 2025, and Algol 68 seems to many to be a historical oddity; a programming language that had as much negative influence as positive.  Most people that I have run into who have even heard of Algol 68 \u201cknow\u201d that it is a complicated language full of weird theoretical ideas that have not aged well, and in the end neither of great utility nor of great interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In my opinion and experience, Algol 68 is largely a victim of mostly misinformed – or uninformed – gossip, and the wisdom and efforts of its designers and implementers are worthy of more reasonable consideration.  Therefore, I hope to show that this language remains relevant, interesting and even useful going on 60 years later.  I hope to dispel some of the \u201creceived ideas\u201d around the language. And I hope to achieve this by demonstrating some simple and useful code examples that show many aspects of the language worth learning and using.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    What makes my quest much easier and more relevant are two fine current, maintained implementations of Algol 68 that are ready for experimentation, and in many cases, daily use.  These are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n