And speaking of ALGOL

[Nigel Williams]

> On 12 Aug 2015, at 11:24 pm, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
>> On Aug 11, 2015, at 10:23 PM, Mark Kahrs <mark.kahrs at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For those of you who might be interested, I sent a listing of the B6700
>> ALGOL compiler source code to the CHM.
>   I did find a copy of the B6500 ESPOL compiler online recently.

In the B5500 emulator repo: https://github.com/pkimpel/retro-b5500/tree/master/source

It is still to be proofed though.
> 
>> I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Burroughs extensions to ALGOL to
>> optimise|ize the use of the native string instructions.
> 
> Did Algol come after the hardware?  I always thought of the hardware as having been customized for their Algol, but admittedly I don’t actually know which is chicken and which is egg.

It is suggested in the oral history at UMN.edu that the B5000 was designed as an ALGOL machine and Burroughs had the idea that only compilers would generate machine code, so they made the B5000 compiler friendly, and the system would have an OS to manage resources, so it was designed around drum/disk being an intrinsic part of the system.