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A history of ALGOL 68

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C. H. LindseyAuthors Info & Claims

HOPL-II: The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages

Pages 97 - 132

https://doi.org/10.1145/154766.155365

Published: 01 March 1993 Publication History

Abstract

ALGOL 68 is a language with a lot of “history”. The reader will hear of discord, resignations, unreadable documents, a minority report, and all manner of politicking. But although ALGOL 68 was produced by a committee (and an unruly one at that), the language itself is no camel. Indeed, the rigorous application of the principle of “orthogonality” makes it one of the cleanest languages around, as I hope to show. Moreover, when the language came to be revised, the atmosphere was quite different enabling a much more robust and readable defining document to be produced in a spirit of true cooperation. There are some lessons here for future language design efforts, but I am not optimistic that they have been learned.

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Cited By

Wirfs-Brock AEich B(2020)JavaScript: the first 20 yearsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33863274:HOPL(1-189)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
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Gibbons J(2020)The School of SquiggolFormal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops10.1007/978-3-030-54997-8_2(35-53)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54997-8_2
Yang F(2008)The orthogonality in C++Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/1352383.135242023:6(213-219)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1352383.1352420
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Reviews

Reviewer: Doris Keefe Lidtke

This lengthy paper is well written, informative, and well documented with a helpful bibliography. The author became a member of the committee in August 1968, so he has first-hand knowledge of the activities. He relies heavily on the detailed minutes of the meetings. As one of the papers presented at the History of Programming Languages Conference earlier this year, this paper contributes to the quality of the proceedings. It is noteworthy that two of the people the author thanks for commenting on his manuscript had signed the Minority Report.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

HOPL-II: The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages

April 1993

370 pages

ISBN:0897915704

DOI:10.1145/154766

Conference Chair:
John A. N. Lee,
Program Chair:
Jean E. Sammet

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 28, Issue 3
March 1993
363 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/155360
Editor:
Richard L. Wexelblat
ACM SIGPLAN Notices; IDA/CSED, Alexandria, VA
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1993 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Cited By

Wirfs-Brock AEich B(2020)JavaScript: the first 20 yearsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33863274:HOPL(1-189)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386327
Gibbons J(2020)The School of SquiggolFormal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops10.1007/978-3-030-54997-8_2(35-53)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54997-8_2
Yang F(2008)The orthogonality in C++Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/1352383.135242023:6(213-219)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1352383.1352420
Schilling J(1995)Dynamically-valued constantsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/202176.20217730:4(13-20)Online publication date: 1-Apr-1995
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/202176.202177

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