ALGOL
ALGOL: the father of mainstream languages
Time traveller Mike Bedford steps back 65 years to the birth of high-level languages and looks at ALGOL, the language that started a revolution.
OUR EXPERT
Mike Bedford hates to admit it, but he had his first experience with ALGOL before it fell out of favour, so getting to grips with it again was a trip down memory lane.
I nthe latest instalment of our series on classic programming languages, we’re turning the clock all the way back to 1958. And that takes us to the earliest days of highlevel languages. If we ignore a couple of languages that few people have even heard of today, and which probably weren’t too influential, only FORTRAN came earlier, and by just a year. The other classic high-level language of the era, COBOL, wouldn’t be released until the following year. The 1958 creation in question is ALGOL, and we have to admit that it never took the world by storm. But unlike FOCAL, our subject last month, ALGOL isn’t just a footnote in the history books. For despite it failing to make converts among the growing band of FORTRAN programmers, it was hugely influential, paving the way for many other languages that followed it, including pretty much all today’s latest and greatest.
Introducing ALGOL
Konrad Zuse is largely forgotten as a computer manufacturer, but his Z22 computer broke new ground in hosting the first ALGOL implementation.
We’ve referred to a language called ALGOL – which stands for the unimaginative ALGOrithmic Language – but no language is referred to as that today. The language introduced in 1958 is now called ALGOL 58 – although it had originally been called IAL, a name that was abandoned because the acronym was unpronounceable – but this was followed by ALGOL 60, then ALGOL 68, which is our prime focus. The concept of an evolving program language, with each iteration being suffixed by a version number or the year of its introduction, isn’t an unfamiliar one.
ALGOL 58 was a proof of concept, but few people had the opportunity to use it. A compiler was created for the Konrad Zuse Z22 computer, and for the Librascope LGP-30 at Dartmouth College, where BASIC would later be developed, but that’s about all. ALGOL 60 can, therefore, be considered the first practical ALGOL language, and while it was used in the scientific community, it never enjoyed huge success, in no small part because of IBM’s lukewarm support for the ALGOL family of languages. The other main ALGOL language was ALGOL 68. It was also used in academia, but not to any great extent elsewhere, partially as a result of the criticism that it was too complicated. However, and this brings us back to our reference to the versions of FORTRAN, the ALGOL family was not CREDIT: JurgenG, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/designed with backwards compatibility in mind, so ALGOL 68 was not a superset of ALGOL 60.