ALGOL 60

Historically important programming language, descendants include Pascal, C, C++, Modula-2, BCPL, PL/I, Oberon, Java, Simula and Smalltalk. Initially introduced in 1958 as IAL with the name changed to ALGOL in 1960, but that original variant is now usually known as Algol-58, it drew its inspiration from the work of Heinz Rutishauser on algorithmic programming and the languages Superplan, IT, Plankalkül and FORTRAN.

Algol-W

By now mostly forgotten, but at the time a superior implementation of ALGOL available for the IBM System/360 and based on the earlier Euler Algol variant. Source code for the Stanford distribution can be found here. Algol-W like its immediate predecessor Euler Algol was written by Niklaus Wirth in PL/360, and is in turn the immediate predecessor to Pascal, although the latter language is smaller as it was not intended to be a systems language like Algol-W and Euler. Notably the original Prolog implementation, one of the few programming languages today that are not related in any way to ALGOL was actually developed in Algol-W.

See also: ALGOL 68

DOS implementations of ALGOL

• Persistent S-algol - TP Source
• RHA Algol-60 - Freeware - Discontinued - Includes source but is nota bene not open source.

Algol like languages

• muSIMP

External articles

• Mikhail A. Bulyonkov, Alexandre F. Rar, Andrey N. Terekhov: Algol 68 – 25 Years in the USSR

Standards

• Original Algol 60 proposal by Peter Naur of BNF fame, a printed version from the AM Newsletter and a German translation prepared and originally published in East Germany.
• Burroughs had an Algol superset called Extended Algol or Burroughs Extended Algol and was used by the company for most programming work for the next decade and was a sort of a minor de facto standard as some other compiler writers took from that implementation, the company had previously used Algol 58 supersets.
• ECMA-02 - Subset of ALGOL 60 - ECMALGOL - 1965 - Withdrawn.
• ECMA TR-01 - A Set of I/O Procedures for ECMALGOL - 1967 - Withdrawn
• ALGOL-N - Formal spec in an English translation put forward by S. Igarashi, T. Iwamura, K. Sakuma, T. Simauti, T. Simuzu, S. Takasu, E. Wada, and N. Yoneda.
• The original Algol-W proposals are now lost, but the Manual still exists.

Algol history

• Initially evolved out of a number of ideas, but the first proposal was made by Heinz Rutishauser in his paper Automatische Rechenplanfortigung bei Programingesteurten Rechenmaschinen in 1951 but the language proposed there became known as Superplan, the paper also available in an English translation. Most of the work made in making Algol a reality was done by the "Zűrich, Mainz, Műnchen, Darmstadt" group, or ZMMD that both had say on the Algol 58 standard and adapted their existing Algorithmic Compiler to the language in 1958.