11 Dec
2008
11 Dec
'08
2:41 p.m.
>>>> "Brent" == Brent Hilpert
<hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> writes:
Brent> ...A few other people mentioned but no more about the origins of
Brent> the language/effort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algol_W says that it came from Niklaus
Wirth (inventor of Pascal). That fits a vague memory -- it was a
proposed successor to Algol-60 but wasn't adopted and Algol-68 was
picked instead. This caused various big names of the time to go
ballistic; I still remember getting scorched by Dijkstra when I
mentioned Algol-68 to him (innocently; I didn't know any of the
background at the time).
It doesn't sound like Waterloo is the W in this case.
paul