Paul Koning wrote:
>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Guzis
<cclist at sydex.com> writes:
Chuck> Were there ever any tiny Algol-60 subsets marketed?
Well, there's DECUS Algol for the PDP-11 (which, according to
comments, apparently was originally done for the PDP-8). That's a
variation of Burroughs 5500 Algol, so it's pretty powerful. It uses
bytecode; roughly speaking, you can think of those as 16-bit analogs
of the B6700 instruction set.
I wouldn't call that tiny; it's actually a substantial superset of
standard Algol. And the bytecode interpreter is pretty large because
of that. But you can use it to write substantial programs -- the
compiler itself for example. That's not particularly doable with
standard Algol-60.
...
We were taught Algol in 1st year Comp Sci, I quite liked it (except for the
verbosity of "BEGIN"-"END") for it's regularity, but that may have
something to
do with it being the first structured language I experienced (various
assemblers and BASICs prior). Waterloo version - I believe it was something
near Algol 68, running in batch (cards) under MTS.
PASCAL was used in 2nd year - seemed like a step backwards.
(Anyone recall the MTS OS: Michigan Terminal System?)