Episode 129 - ALGOL, Part I

Advent of Computing

ALGOL is one of those topics that's haunted the show for a while. It comes up any time we talk about programming languages, and with good reason. Many of the features and ideas found in modern languages have their roots in ALGOL. Despite that influence, ALGOL itself remains somewhat obscure. It never reached the highs of a C or LISP.

In this series we are going to look at ALGOL from 1958 all up to 1968, keeping a careful eye on how the language evolved, how it's problems were addressed, and how new problems were introduced.

Selected Sources:

https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/paper/Backus-Syntax_and_Semantics_of_Proposed_IAL.pdf - Backus, 1958 IAL report

https://algol60.org/reports/algol60_rr.pdf - ALGOL 1960 Report

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/1060960.1060966 - Cleaning Up Algol