Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!unisoft!gethen!isaac
From: isaac@gethen.UUCP (Isaac Rabinovitch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol 60 vs Algol 68 (was "stack machines (Burroughs)")
Summary: What did we lose with Algol W?
Message-ID: <961@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jun 88 04:11:11 GMT
References: <1521@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1532@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <476@pcrat.UUCP> <130@quintus.UUCP>
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 47

In article <130@quintus.UUCP>, ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
> In article <949@gethen.UUCP> isaac@gethen.UUCP (Isaac Rabinovitch) writes:
> Not the whole of the committee.  There was a "Minority Report".
> Ah, if only the committee had heeded the concerns of the Minority Report;
> we might have had ADA _years_ earlier (:-).
Hmm, I'm not too familiar with Ada, and it's been a long time since I
used Algol W, but it seems to me that Algol W was a far simpler
language.  Perhaps the two have crucial features in common, but most of
the controversy with Ada seems to be not with the quality of ideas
involved but the *quantity*.
> 
> The irony of it all is that Pascal is significantly crippled
> with respect to Algol W.
Could you expand on that point?  I don't remember enough Algol W to
understand what you mean, but I do remember enough to be intriqued by
your argument.  I used to like to like Algol W for its elegance of
semantic and syntactic elegance (every block had a value, for example),
but everybody else I knew thought that "elegance" made the language
kludgy.

Anecdotal (and probably not persuasive) counterexample:  I once
participated in a class project in which we were trying to implement a
large program with Algol W running on an IBM 360/40 with half a meg of
memory.  (Gad, the AT clone I'm using now is more powerful.)  Because of
intrinsic limitations with Algol W, we tried to switch to Pascal --
which required more memory than we had!  So I had to wait a decade to
try Pascal.
> 
> The essential ideas of Algol 68 were that the whole language should be
> precisely defined and that all the pieces should fit together smoothly.
Then they went and came up with the most complicated language definition
ever, ruining any hopes of achieving that goal.
> The basic idea behind Pascal was that it didn't matter how vague the
> language specification was (it took *years* to clarify) or how many rough
> edges there were, as long as the CDC Pascal compiler was fast.
It's worth remembering that Wirth never meant the language to be *used*.
It was supposed to be a language for *thinking* about computing, not
implementing systems.  I've got early 70s Pascal books that use dialects
of Pascal that were never even implemented, and never meant to be.

The main reason Pascal is so popular today is the same reason BASIC is:
micro programmers were hungry for high-level (relatively) languages, and
vendors addressed the marketplace by adapting teaching tools.  Thank
goodness they never got round to PILOT!


Isaac Rabinovitch