In the sense that the syntax of most modern languages is "Algol-like",[3] it was arguably more influential than three other high-level programming languages among which it was roughly contemporary: FORTRAN, Lisp, and COBOL.[4] It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, Ada, and C.
ALGOL introduced code blocks and the begin...end pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language which gave detailed attention to formal language definition and through the Algol 60 Report introduced Backus–Naur form, a principal formal grammar notation for language design.
There were three major specifications, named after the years they were first published:
ALGOL 58 – originally proposed to be called IAL, for International Algebraic Language.
ALGOL 60 – first implemented as X1 ALGOL 60 in 1961. Revised 1963.[5][6][7]
ALGOL 68 – introduced new elements including flexible arrays, slices, parallelism, operator identification. Revised 1973.[8]
ALGOL 68 is substantially different from ALGOL 60 and was not well received,[according to whom?] so reference to "Algol" is generally understood to mean ALGOL 60 and its dialects.[citation needed]
History
ALGOL was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in a meeting in 1958 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (cf. ALGOL 58).[9] It specified three different syntaxes: a reference syntax, a publication syntax, and an implementation syntax, syntaxes that permitted it to use different keyword names and conventions for decimal points (commas vs periods) for different languages.[5]
ALGOL was used mostly by research computer scientists in the United States and in Europe; commercial applications were hindered by the absence of standard input/output facilities in its description, and the lack of interest in the language by large computer vendors (other than Burroughs Corporation).[10] ALGOL 60 did however become the standard for the publication of algorithms and had a profound effect on future language development.[10]
Family tree of the Algol, Fortran and COBOL programming language dynasty
John Backus developed the Backus normal form method of describing programming languages specifically for ALGOL 58. It was revised and expanded by Peter Naur for ALGOL 60, and at Donald Knuth's suggestion renamed Backus–Naur form.[11]
Peter Naur: "As editor of the ALGOL Bulletin I was drawn into the international discussions of the language and was selected to be member of the European language design group in November 1959. In this capacity I was the editor of the ALGOL 60 report, produced as the result of the ALGOL 60 meeting in Paris in January 1960."[12]
The following people attended the meeting in Paris (from 11 to 16 January):[5]
Alan Perlis gave a vivid description of the meeting: "The meetings were exhausting, interminable, and exhilarating. One became aggravated when one's good ideas were discarded along with the bad ones of others. Nevertheless, diligence persisted during the entire period. The chemistry of the 13 was excellent."[13]
Legacy
A significant contribution of the ALGOL 58 Report was to provide standard terms for programming concepts: statement, declaration, type, label, primary, block, and others.[10]
ALGOL 60 inspired many languages that followed it. Tony Hoare remarked: "Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors."[14] The Scheme programming language, a variant of Lisp that adopted the block structure and lexical scope of ALGOL, also adopted the wording "Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme" for its standards documents in homage to ALGOL.[15]
ALGOL 60 as officially defined had no I/O facilities; implementations defined their own in ways that were rarely compatible with each other. In contrast, ALGOL 68 offered an extensive library of transput (input/output) facilities.
ALGOL 60 allowed for two evaluation strategies for parameter passing: the common call-by-value, and call-by-name. Call-by-name has certain effects in contrast to call-by-reference. For example, without specifying the parameters as value or reference, it is impossible to develop a procedure that will swap the values of two parameters if the actual parameters that are passed in are an integer variable and an array that is indexed by that same integer variable.[16] Think of passing a pointer to swap(i, A[i]) in to a function. Now that every time swap is referenced, it is reevaluated. Say i := 1 and A[i] := 2, so every time swap is referenced it will return the other combination of the values ([1,2], [2,1], [1,2] and so on). A similar situation occurs with a random function passed as actual argument.
Call-by-name is known by many compiler designers for the interesting "thunks" that are used to implement it. Donald Knuth devised the "man or boy test" to separate compilers that correctly implemented "recursion and non-local references." This test contains an example of call-by-name.
ALGOL 68 was defined using a two-level grammar formalism invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden and which bears his name. Van Wijngaarden grammars use a context-free grammar to generate an infinite set of productions that will recognize a particular ALGOL 68 program; notably, they are able to express the kind of requirements that in many other programming language standards are labelled "semantics" and have to be expressed in ambiguity-prone natural language prose, and then implemented in compilers as ad hoc code attached to the formal language parser.
Examples and portability
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Code sample comparisons
ALGOL 60
(The way the bold text has to be written depends on the implementation, e.g. 'INTEGER'—quotation marks included—for integer. This is known as stropping.)
procedure Absmax(a) Size:(n, m) Result:(y) Subscripts:(i, k);
value n, m; array a; integer n, m, i, k; real y;
comment The absolute greatest element of the matrix a, of size n by m,
is copied to y, and the subscripts of this element to i and k;
begininteger p, q;
y := 0; i := k := 1;
for p := 1 step 1 until n dofor q := 1 step 1 until m doif abs(a[p, q]) > y thenbegin y := abs(a[p, q]);
i := p; k := q
endend Absmax
Here is an example of how to produce a table using Elliott 803 ALGOL.[17]
FLOATING POINT ALGOL TEST'
BEGIN REAL A,B,C,D'
READ D'
FOR A:= 0.0 STEP D UNTIL 6.3 DO
BEGIN
PRINT PUNCH(3),££L??'
B := SIN(A)'
C := COS(A)'
PRINT PUNCH(3),SAMELINE,ALIGNED(1,6),A,B,C'
END
END'
ALGOL 68
The following code samples are ALGOL 68 versions of the above ALGOL 60 code samples.
ALGOL 68 implementations used ALGOL 60's approaches to stropping. In ALGOL 68's case tokens with the bold typeface are reserved words, types (modes) or operators.
proc abs max = ([,]real a, refreal y, refint i, k)real:
comment The absolute greatest element of the matrix a, of size ⌈a by 2⌈a
is transferred to y, and the subscripts of this element to i and k; commentbeginreal y := 0; i := ⌊a; k := 2⌊a;
for p from ⌊a to ⌈a dofor q from 2⌊a to 2⌈a doifabs a[p, q] > y then
y := abs a[p, q];
i := p; k := q
fiodod;
y
end # abs max #
Note: lower (⌊) and upper (⌈) bounds of an array, and array slicing, are directly available to the programmer.
floating point algol68 test:
(
real a,b,c,d;
# printf – sends output to the filestand out. #
# printf($p$); – selects a new page #
printf(($pg$,"Enter d:"));
read(d);
for step from 0 while a:=step*d; a <= 2*pi do
printf($l$); # $l$ - selects a new line. #
b := sin(a);
c := cos(a);
printf(($z-d.6d$,a,b,c)) # formats output with 1 digit before and 6 after the decimal point. #
od
)
Timeline: Hello world
The variations and lack of portability of the programs from one implementation to another is easily demonstrated by the classic hello world program.[citation needed]
Since ALGOL 60 had no I/O facilities, there is no portable hello world program in ALGOL.
The next three examples are in Burroughs Extended Algol. The first two direct output at the interactive terminal they are run on. The first uses a character array, similar to C. The language allows the array identifier to be used as a pointer to the array, and hence in a REPLACE statement.
An even simpler program using the Display statement. Note that its output would end up at the system console ('SPO'):
BEGINDISPLAY("HELLO WORLD!")END.
An alternative example, using Elliott Algol I/O is as follows. Elliott Algol used different characters for "open-string-quote" and "close-string-quote", represented here by ‘ and ’.
programHiFolks;beginprint‘Helloworld’end;
Below is a version from Elliott 803 Algol (A104). The standard Elliott 803 used five-hole paper tape and thus only had upper case. The code lacked any quote characters so £ (UK Pound Sign) was used for open quote and ? (Question Mark) for close quote. Special sequences were placed in double quotes (e.g. ££L?? produced a new line on the teleprinter).
HIFOLKS'
BEGIN
PRINT £HELLO WORLD£L??'
END'
The ICT 1900 series Algol I/O version allowed input from paper tape or punched card. Paper tape 'full' mode allowed lower case. Output was to a line printer. The open and close quote characters were represented using '(' and ')' and spaces by %.[18]
The ALGOLs were conceived at a time when character sets were diverse and evolving rapidly; also, the ALGOLs were defined so that only uppercase letters were required.
1960: IFIP – The Algol 60 language and report included several mathematical symbols which are available on modern computers and operating systems, but, unfortunately, were unsupported on most computing systems at the time. For instance: ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ≠, ¬, ∨, ∧, ⊂, ≡, ␣ and ⏨.
1961 September: ASCII – The ASCII character set, then in an early stage of development, had the \ (Back slash) character added to it in order to support ALGOL's Boolean operators /\ and \/.[19]
1962: ALCOR – This character set included the unusual "᛭" runic cross[20] character for multiplication and the "⏨" Decimal Exponent Symbol[21] for floating point notation.[22][23][24]
1964: GOST – The 1964 Soviet standard GOST 10859 allowed the encoding of 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit and 7-bit characters in ALGOL.[25]
1968: The "Algol 68 Report" – used extant ALGOL characters, and further adopted →, ↓, ↑, □, ⌊, ⌈, ⎩, ⎧, ○, ⊥, and ¢ characters which can be found on the IBM 2741 keyboard with typeball (or golf ball) print heads inserted (such as the APL golf ball). These became available in the mid-1960s while ALGOL 68 was being drafted. The report was translated into Russian, German, French, and Bulgarian, and allowed programming in languages with larger character sets, e.g., Cyrillic alphabet of the Soviet BESM-4. All ALGOL's characters are also part of the Unicode standard and most of them are available in several popular fonts.
2009 October: Unicode – The ⏨ (Decimal Exponent Symbol) for floating point notation was added to Unicode 5.2 for backward compatibility with historic Buran programme ALGOL software.[26]
ALGOL implementations
To date there have been at least 70 augmentations, extensions, derivations and sublanguages of Algol 60.[27]
Name
Year
Author
Country
Description
Target CPU
ZMMD-implementation
1958
Friedrich L. Bauer, Heinz Rutishauser, Klaus Samelson, Hermann Bottenbruch
^The name of this language family is sometimes given in mixed case (Algol 60Archived 25 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine), and sometimes in all uppercase (ALGOL68Archived 13 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine). For simplicity this article uses ALGOL.
^Baumann, R. (October 1961). "ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group, Part 1" [ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group]. Elektronische Rechenanlagen (in German): 206–212.
^Baumann, R. (December 1961). "ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group, Part 2" [ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group]. Elektronische Rechenanlagen (in German). 6: 259–265.
^Baumann, R. (April 1962). "ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group, Part 3" [ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group]. Elektronische Rechenanlagen (in German). 2.
^Broukhis, Leonid (22 January 2008). "Revised proposal to encode the decimal exponent symbol"(PDF). www.unicode.org. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2. Archived(PDF) from the original on 31 July 2015. Retrieved 24 January 2016. This means that the need to transcode GOST-based software and documentation can still arise: legacy numerical algorithms (some of which may be of interest, e.g. for the automatic landing of the Buran shuttle ...) optimized for the non-IEEE floating point representation of BESM-6 cannot be simply recompiled and be expected to work reliably, and some human intervention may be necessary.
^Computer Museum HistoryArchived 20 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine, Historical Zuse-Computer Z23, restored by the Konrad Zuse Schule in Hünfeld, for the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View (California) US
^Kruseman Aretz, F.E.J. (30 June 2003). "The Dijkstra-Zonneveld ALGOL 60 Compiler for the Electrologica X1". Software Engineering(PDF). History of Computer Science. Amsterdam: Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Archived(PDF) from the original on 4 March 2016.
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