Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler | Hacker News Reader

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

fosdem.org

48 pointsmatt_d23 comments

Algol 68 was a bit before my time, but c.1980 we did learn Algol W (W=Wirth) at Bristol Uni., which was Niklaus Wirth's idea of what Algol 68 should have been, and a predeceesor to Pascal, Modula-2, etc.

from wikipedia: "ALGOL 68 (short for Algorithmic Language 1968) is an imperative programming language member of the ALGOL family that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously defined syntax and semantics.

The complexity of the language's definition, which runs to several hundred pages filled with non-standard terminology, made compiler implementation difficult and it was said it had "no implementations and no users". This was only partly true; ALGOL 68 did find use in several niche markets, notably in the United Kingdom where it was popular on International Computers Limited (ICL) machines, and in teaching roles. Outside these fields, use was relatively limited.

Nevertheless, the contributions of ALGOL 68 to the field of computer science have been deep, wide-ranging and enduring, although many of these contributions were only publicly identified when they had reappeared in subsequently developed programming languages. Many languages were developed specifically as a response to the perceived complexity of the language, the most notable being Pascal, or were reimplementations for specific roles, like Ada.

Many languages of the 1970s trace their design specifically to ALGOL 68, selecting some features while abandoning others that were considered too complex or out-of-scope for given roles. Most modern languages trace at least some of their syntax to either C or Pascal, and thus directly or indirectly to ALGOL 68"

My guess is someone took the 'no implementations' saying as a personal challenge.

That isn't totally true, even on Linux we have had https://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/en.algol-68-genie.html for years.

Also, most languages trace back to ALGOL 60 (the C family tree goes ALGOL 60 -> BCPL -> CPL -> B -> new B -> C -> ANSI C -> ..., though there was some influence such as the idea of "casting", but apparently C only has a castrated version of what ALGOL 68 had) and Pascal is if anything negativly influenced by ALGOL 68 due to Wirth's disagreements with van Wijngaarden: https://dcreager.net/people/wirth/1968-closing-word/.

There were implementations, e.g. UK Navy had one, even if it wasn't 100% complete as per standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68-R

In a world where Burroughs/Unisys MCP still exists, I have to believe there is still production code written in Algol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP

That wasn't a particularly pleasant talk to watch. While I think he was trying to be funny, he really just came across as obnoxious. I'm not expecting sweetness and light here, but dunking on other languages for no good reason isn't going to attract all that many people to using the language.

To each his own; I really like his presentation style and the humor!

I prefer Simula 67 ;-)

Yeah, that Algol code is not very pretty :-). I'm sticking with my namesake from 1980...

One thing I always liked about some older languages was being able to have blanks in identifiers. Although I see that they actually managed to invent a new stropping variant that doesn't work with that… For the "kids"…

Modula-2 happened way before my time but was quite taken by it. Especially it's fibres/coroutine features.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688380

Apparently the Russian Glonass satellites are programmed in Modula-2 [1] which seems like a wild choice.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2#Russian_radionavigati...

Well, back in the 1980's up to early 90's, Modula-2 enjoyed a mild success in Europe.

Given that it was available in 1978, and the satellites launched in 1982, it seems a plausible choice like any other, given the computing ecosystem at the time.

In 1999 I used Modula-2 for my first computer science/programming languages exam at university. The environment was a bit like Turbo Pascal 3.0, though with a more complete language (TP3 had no modules/units) and library, comparable perhaps to TP5.

Units were introduced in Turbo Pascal 4, then TP 5.5 added OOP based on Apple's Object Pascal, further improvements were then based on the Object Pasca / C++ relationship on Borland's compilers.

The first compiler I ever bought with my own money was a Modula-2 compiler for my Atari ST I picked up second hand for something like $100 CAD, which was a lot back in the late 80s for a teenager.

Was a mistake not to just do C, though. The Atari ST's whole OS environment was built with C void pointers and duck typing in mind.

The teaching language for my undergrad OS course (late 80s) was Modula-2. We had no experience with it prior to the class (but had experience with Pascal and several other languages by this point) and the whole of intro was "get Kim King's Modula-2 book". Everyone seemed to pick up the language just fine. Unfortunate it never much took off.

I used Modula-2 to build an automated lab system. It worked, but I found myself being annoyed by small features. For instance the type conversion keywords seemed to have no pattern to them, and the case sensitivity meant you were always hammering shift. Some good ideas, but I'm not sure that the problems of the time and the size of the available computers made them particularly useful.

There's also Algol 68 Genie (a68g), a GPLv3 Algol 68 compiler and interpreter:

https://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/en.algol-68-genie.html

Apart from it being an interesting technical challenge or hobby is there any mundane practical reason for creating An Algol 68 compiler?

I'd love to be corrected, but my intuition tells me probably not.

The only pragmatic use for a modern Algol 68 compiler I can think of would be to port a legacy codebase to a modern system, but any existing Algol 68 codebase will likely see greater porting challenges arising out of the operating system change than from the programming language.

Some of those codebases might be (interesting) operating systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68#Operating_systems_wri...

According to https://algol68-lang.org/, and as expressed in the recording, the contributors (specifically Marchesi) believe that ALGOL 68 continues to have advantages over other languages to this day ("more modern, powerful and safe" and "without successors"). One mentioned in the video is that the more complex, two-level grammars allow properties that would usually be described in the semantics of a language to be formally expressed in the syntax (the example he gives is the behaviour of numeral coercion). I guess this is not a surprise, as van Wijngaarden grammars are known to be Turing complete, but nevertheless it seems like something interesting thing to investiagate! There is a lot of lost wisdom in the past, that we dismiss because it doesn't fit into the language we use nowadays.

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