16 Feb
2025
16 Feb
'25
7:25 a.m.
Paul Koning
It would be great to learn more about that. It's
a rather early machine
for ALGOL to show up there, though a precedessor of ALGOL (IAL,
"International Algebraic Language") appeared in 1958. That was a bit of a
mess and the 1960 Report on ALGOL-60 is quite different. Apparently IAL
served as the inspiration for JOVIAL, though in my view the designer of
JOVIAL clearly demonstrated that he didn't at all understand the core
principles of IAL or ALGOL.
I had the pleasure of using JOVIAL on one of the F-16 subsystems. I
recall its "A" type, a kind of user-defined fixed type (where you
controlled the amount of precision/resolution you needed).
On Sun, Feb 16, 2025 at 8:32 AM Paul Koning <paulkoning(a)comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> > On Feb 15, 2025, at 11:24 PM, Steve Lewis via cctalk <
> cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > I'm not very familiar with ALGOL, but just today I met someone at VCF who
> > has essentially built a replica of the LGP-30 (in FPGA form, more on that
> > to come down the road, but it is a system from 1955/1956). Then related
> to
> > that, two different people mentioned to me of an early ALGOL compiler
> being
> > available for the LGP-30. I don't know if that was of a form to be
> > considered any kind of "block structure" as you mentioned.
>
It would be great to learn more about that. It's
a rather early machine
for ALGOL to show up there, though a precedessor of ALGOL (IAL,
"International Algebraic Language") appeared in 1958. That was a bit of a
mess and the 1960 Report on ALGOL-60 is quite different. Apparently IAL
served as the inspiration for JOVIAL, though in my view the designer of
JOVIAL clearly demonstrated that he didn't at all understand the core
principles of IAL or ALGOL.
>
> A lot of early "ALGOL" compilers did major subsetting because it was
> considered to hard to do the real language. Those subsets may not actually
> bear any real resemblance to the actual language. For example, a
"subset"
> that omits recursion is not ALGOL but rather a mongrel joke.
>
> One of the major contributions of Dijkstra and Zonneveld isn't just that
> they built the first compiler for the full ALGOL-60, but that they invented
> all the major compiler construction mechanisms to make that possible. This
> is analyzed very well and in impressive detail in the Ph.D. Thesis of
> Gauthier van den Hove.
>
> paul
>
>