I never thanked you for the following message. I now do: thanks _a lot_.
---------------------------------------- > From: Akim Demaille <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: 29 Aug 2001 13:09:46 +0200 > > Paul> The "&" is my own invention, but the "t" came from the source > Paul> code of the ALGOL68C compiler, written by Steve Bourne (of > Paul> Bourne shell fame), > > Is there is any place where I could actually make my education and > learn such things? I mean, I have a great deal of respect for Algol 68, > but I know very little about its history. You had to ask. :-) For a really brief intro, please see: C.H.A. Koster A shorter history of ALGOL68 http://www.csd.uu.se/~richardc/txt/ALGOL68.txt For a longer story, full of juicy politics, please see: C.H.A. Koster The Making of Algol 68 http://www.nunan.fsnet.co.uk/algol68/Making-Algol68.zip And there is the more official version, at: Charles Lindsey A history of ALGOL 68 2nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages (1993) pages 97-132 http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/plan/154766/p97-lindsey/ (This is the abstract; the full paper requires an ACM library subscription.) There is also a brief introduction to Algol 68 in the same proceedings, but to my mind the best textual introduction to Algol 68 is: Andrew Tanenbaum A Tutorial on Algol 68 ACM Computing Surveys 8, 2 (1976), 155-190. This is the same Andrew Tanenbaum resposible for Minix, the immediate inspiration for Linux. If you want more history, working compilers, etc, please see the nice index at: http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Algol_68/ I suggest ALGOL 68S <http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl/> but there are others. PS. While researching this I found that ALGOL68C is still commercially available from a little-known scientific consultancy firm based in Cambridge, England, one that does security work for the UK government! I can't help wondering whether any of my 25-year-old code snippets are still in it. (Perhaps now you see why I prefer the GPL. :-)
