On Mar 10, 9:49 am, la...@wall.org (Larry Wall) wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:10:29AM +1100, Timothy S. Nelson wrote: > : Algol 68 is notorious as a failure. Let's hope things are > : different here. So they say: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD+algol-68
There may be some similarities with perl6. I speculate that if Algol68 was named something else, then the Algol60 implementers would not have gotten their noses so far out of joint. BTW: "notorious as a failure" is a good way of describing Algol68 as it was not exactly a failure. For example several Operating Systems were written in Algol68 variants: DRA's Flex, ICL's VME, the Soviet Эльбрус-1 and the Cambridge CAP computer. c.f. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bbcoc/ancient_operating_system_written_in_algol68_with/ It google is looking for a > Alternately, they probably would have bootstrapped Algol into its > own ubiquitous language had the Open Source movement existed back then. > History would have been much different. Moot point... to this day it is virtually impossible to get sufficient access to the source code to the classic Algol68 compilers. The only exception being the partial release of Algol68RS (missing the format/transport/io libraries) > Incidentally, I programmed in Algol W on a Burroughs machine once, > long, long ago in a galaxy far away... Algol W was my first HLL too. There is a Algol-W to C implementation: aw2c: http://www.jampan.co.nz/~glyn/ It is opensource - save for the test suite. I think the original Algol-W compile's source - written in PL/360 has long since been lost. N
