It's true that what we now call ALGOL 58 was never a specification, let along a standard. But it wasn't a dead end, either. The title of the report that described it was "Preliminary Report--International Algebraic Language" (Communications of the ACM, Volume 1, Number 12 (December 1958), pages 8-22). It was a progress report on the effort to design a new language. The ACM-GAMM committee kept refining their ideas and eventually came up with ALGOL 60.
The problem was that the ideas proposed by the committee's progress report were so interesting that the report quickly spawned numerous implementations, each with their own dialect and limitations, including JOVIAL, NELIAC, ALGO for the Bendix G-15, and two versions from Burroughs known as BALGOL, one for the 220 and one for the Datatron 205.
