4 Dec
2020
4 Dec
'20
7:17 a.m.
On Dec 4, 2020, at 12:38 AM, Josh Dersch via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 6:13 PM Kevin Jordan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> ...
> The problem we're experiencing with ALGOL appears to be a glaring compiler
> bug, but the compiler was distributed widely through DECUS, and it is
> difficult to imagine that it would have been released with an obvious bug,
DECUS just distributed what it was given; there is no QA or review process. If the author
submitted bad code, nothing DECUS would do would get in the way.
.... We suspect that this compiler just has a lot of
bugs.
Note also that Appendix E (page E-1) suggests that ALL 'END' statements be
followed by a ";". This seemed to help at least with getting the compiler
to stop giving us errors. Note that despite this suggestion, the examples
in Appendix E fail to follow this guideline.
That's certainly a pretty bizarre suggestion. It's legal code either way, but in
ALGOL (and PASCAL) semicolon is a separator, NOT a terminator, and the suggestion makes it
appear that the authors don't understand the language well enough to know this. That
clearly isn't a recipe for a reliable compiler.
I thought ALGOL-11 (by Barry Folsom) was derived from ALGOL-8. Maybe that's a
different ALGOL-8, or maybe I'm just confused. That ALGOL looks like a subset of
Burroughs extended ALGOL.
paul