11 Jan
2019
11 Jan
'19
10:29 a.m.
In the June 1966 CACM [1], Wirth and Hoare published "A contribution to the
development of ALGOL”, which describes a language very similar to Algol W. In Wirth’s
Turing Award lecture (published in the Feb 1985 CACM [2]) "From programming language
design to computer construction”, he noted:
“The Working Group assumed the task of proposing a successor and soon split into two
camps. On one side were the ambitious who wanted to erect another milestone in language
design, and, on the other, those who felt that time was pressing and that an adequately
extended ALGOL 60 would be a productive endeavor. I belonged to this second party and
submitted a proposal that lost the election. Thereafter, the proposal was improved with
contributions from Tony Hoare (a member of the same group) and implemented on Stanford
University's first IBM 360. The language later became known as ALGOL W and was used
in several universities for teaching purposes.”
In particular, Hoare’s work on “Record Handling” (see [3]) had a strong impact on Algol W
and Wirth’s later languages.
[1] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/365696.3657022
[2] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2786.2789
[3] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/standards/.
On Jan 10, 2019, at 7:06 PM, clemc(a)ccc.com wrote:
From: Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com <mailto:clemc@ccc.com>>
To: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org <mailto:dave@horsfall.org>>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs@tuhs.org>>
Dave. The w in Algolw was Wirth. He was at Stanford at the time. It was written in
PL/360 btw. The sources are googlable. FWIW Pascal was done a couple of years later
with lessons learned from Algolw and reaction to Algol68.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On Jan 10, 2019, at 6:52 PM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org <mailto:dave@horsfall.org>> wrote:
[Not sure whether this is more appropriate for COFF instead, so it's here; advice
(apart from STFU) gratefully accepted.)
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare FRS FREng was born on this day in 1934; a computer
pioneer (one of the greats) he gave us things like the quicksort algorithm (which became
qsort() in Unix) and ALGOLW (a neat language).
-- Dave