Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by how hard this article is on Algol 68. It was pretty influential:

- Influenced C's type system. I'm just going to quote Dennis Ritchie on this: "The scheme of type composition adopted by C owes considerable debt to Algol 68, although it did not, perhaps, emerge in a form that Algol's adherents would approve of. The central notion I captured from Algol was a type structure based on atomic types (including structures), composed into arrays, pointers (references), and functions (procedures). Algol 68's concept of unions and casts also had an influence that appeared later."

- Influenced bash's syntax (fi, esac)

- I'm not sure if this counts as an influence or not, but objections to Algol 68's design lead Niklaus Wirth to revive his earlier proposal for a new version of Algol, called Algol W, and ultimately evolve it into Pascal.

That ALGOL-68 was hated by almost everyone who like previous ALGOL versions is not to be discounted.

ALGOL-68 was loved by people who would have never used ALGOL to begin with (and they didn't start doing so with ALGOL-68).

It was difficult to write compilers for, slow & far too complex.

Looking back at ALGOL-68, it looks like comparatively small language compared to many of our current languages, e.g. Java, C++ and Python. I loved the definition of it, but never got to use it.

That modern languages are even worse does not make ALGOL-68 good, in my opinion. It's understandable why people would like it, though, compared to modern languages.

It's very similar to Go.

And like go, it's loved by people who don't know ALGOLs and hated otherwise.

That's definitely an uncommon comparison.

Go is basically Oberon with C-ish syntax, and Oberon is probably the Wirthiest of Wirth languages, basically everything Wirth thought was good distilled into a single language. And given that Wirth's whole family tree of languages exists because he objected to Algol 68 so hard he walked out on Algol...

It's a pretty common comparison, actually. I think the first "big" article on Go was one comparing Go to ALGOL-68.

http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/

Oberon-2 merged with Limbo to be more precise, actually.

Although Oberon not only had Oberon-2 as successor, it had Active Oberon, Oberon.NET, Zonnon, Component Pascal and Oberon-07, the later with multiple revisions.

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