On Mar 14, 2023, at 8:59 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: You have to realize that even top-notch computer scientists like Hoare, Dijkstra are/were still people just like us and have their own biases! And the context matters. The a68 fights were before my time. I learned about it at grad school on my own and at the time I had no preconceptions about it (or for that matter any other language). Reading the Algol68 Revised Report was hard but all became clear when I read an introductory book by Brailsford and Walker, and another by Pagan. I liked a68's uniform syntax and semantics very much, in spite of surface syntax issues like DO .. OD. I just think it got a very bad rap due to personalities, the language of report itself, the strong opinions of its language committee, the state of art computers at the time etc. etc. Today it seems like a smaller language than today's C++, Rust, Swift etc. If I were to write as many lines of code in it as I have in C++, possibly I may dislike it but probably not as much as C++. Cowan made a point that CL is a committee designed language that is "not a nightmare". I agree. I missed noting that.