ACCU :: Algol 68 – A Retrospective
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Algol 68 has influenced programming languages in many ways. Daniel James reminds us just how many.This month marks the 50th anniversary of the inception of the Algorithmic Language Algol 68 – the first programming language I ever learned, back in 1974 when I first encountered these things called computers, as an undergraduate.I wrote ‘inception’ … perhaps a little background overview is required.Nowadays we have more programming languages than you can shake the proverbial stick at, and computers that can shake the stick for you, but in the early 1960s there were really only three major languages available: COBOL for business programming, and FORTRAN and Algol for scientific work (LISP was also around, and deserves an honourable mention, but I’d hesitate to call it ‘major’). The latter two were designed with slightly different goals in mind: FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) was developed at IBM specifically for programming computers, while Algol (ALGOrithmic Language), developed by…

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