14 Facts About ALGOL 68

1.

ALGOL 68 is an imperative programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously defined syntax and semantics.

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2.

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.

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3.

ALGOL 68 was designed by the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.

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4.

ALGOL 68 was defined using a formalism, a two-level formal grammar, invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden.

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5.

ALGOL 68 was the first major language for which a full formal definition was made before it was implemented.

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6.

Hoare and Edsger Dijkstra, for abandoning the simplicity of ALGOL 68 60, becoming a vehicle for complex or overly general ideas, and doing little to make the compiler writer's task easier, in contrast to deliberately simple contemporaries such as C, S-algol and Pascal.

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7.

ALGOL 68 had a notable influence in the Soviet Union, details of which can be found in Andrey Ershov's 2014 paper: "ALGOL 68 and Its Impact on the USSR and Russian Programming", and "????? 68 ? ??? ??????? ?? ???????????????? ? ???? ? ??????".

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8.

ALGOL 68, as the name implies, is a follow-on to the ALGOL language that was first formalized in 1960.

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9.

Also, the lower bound of Algol 68 arrays is one by default, but can be any integer from -max int to max int.

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10.

ALGOL 68 has a hierarchy of contexts which determine the kind of coercions available at a particular point in the program.

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11.

ALGOL 68 being an expression-oriented programming language, the value returned by an assignment statement is a reference to the destination.

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12.

Feature of ALGOL 68, inherited from the ALGOL tradition, is its different representations.

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13.

ALGOL 68's reserved words are effectively in a different namespace from identifiers, and spaces are allowed in identifiers, so this next fragment is legal:.

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14.

ALGOL 68 allows for every natural language to define its own set of keywords Algol-68.

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