Algol 68 – A Retrospective

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2024-11-10 02:00:04

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the inception of the Algorithmic Language Algol 68 – the first programming language I ever learned, back in 1974 when I first encountered these things called computers, as an undergraduate.

Nowadays we have more programming languages than you can shake the proverbial stick at, and computers that can shake the stick for you, but in the early 1960s there were really only three major languages available: COBOL for business programming, and FORTRAN and Algol for scientific work (LISP was also around, and deserves an honourable mention, but I’d hesitate to call it ‘major’). The latter two were designed with slightly different goals in mind: FORTRAN ( FOR mula TRAN slation) was developed at IBM specifically for programming computers, while Algol ( ALGO rithmic L anguage), developed by a European and American team at ETH Zurich, was designed also to enable the expression of algorithms in a concise but human-readable form.

FORTRAN was the more widely used – in part because it had IBM behind it, but also because it was seen as the more portable language. The designers of Algol decided not to specify standard input and output operations as they felt that language implementers were better placed to define these facilities for the platform on which they were working. This meant that each new implementation of Algol had its own non-portable i/o functions, and this lack of portability had an impact on the acceptance of Algol.