13 Jan
2025
13 Jan
'25
12:57 p.m.
On 2025-01-13 12:18 p.m., Brent Hilpert via cctalk wrote:
I used AlgolW on MTS at UBC in ’78 as a CS undergrad.
Still have the textbook “FANGET AN - an algolw primer”, and my greenbar listings
(but threw out the box of batch cards some years go, lol).
I rather liked algol, the course work moved to Pascal the next year, and felt like a
downgrade.
Then I met curly-brace languages and no longer had much patience for begin-end.
This quote comes to mind.
Monty Brewster: What are you gonna vote?
Crowd: [in unison] None of the above!
The politics involved with ALGOL for 1) having a character set with no
[] but lots of the /\ \/ like characters,
2)not having a machine with ample power for recursion and indexed
data structures.
3) Eggheads who kept adding features, like call by name and dynamic arrays.
4)Student and production compilers where two different beasts with
No standard defined IO, do to a lack of standard disc operating system
calls.
really slowed use of algol type languages in development and use.
In upgrading Algol60, Algol W and ’68 were apparently
alternatives/competitors.
Funny when the 8 and 16 bit micros hit the market, Algol seemed to
vanish off the face of the earth. Was 64KB too small a address space?
I never liked the idea of dynamic arrays, who knows when the heap? will
overflow.
With static data it fits, or not at all.