11 Dec
2008
11 Dec
'08
2:28 p.m.
On 11 Dec 2008 at 16:51, Paul Koning wrote:
Hm, I wouldn't have said that. Did a bunch in
Algol-60 (my first
language, too) and some years later in Pascal, having traveled through
Fortran and Basic and PL/I in between. I would say Pascal is every
bit as good as Algol-60 -- a few missing things added, and a few
mistakes removed. Both have sane syntax, quite unlike the absurdities
of C, or (almost but not quite as bad) PL/I.
Algol and FORTRAN at one time represented the European-versus-US
computing community division. ACM CALGO would take algorithms
submitted in either language.
My experience with Algol was very brief, using a miserable
implementation that required one to prefix each keyword with a $
(perhaps the author had some experience with JOVIAL) and gave very
cryptic diagnostics. The Algol-60 report was unusual for its time in
that it used upper-and-lower case alphabetics (as well as boldface)
to describe language elements.
Cheers,
Chuck