hkr4627@acf4.UUCP (Hedley K. J. Rainnie) (02/20/85)
I am a fan of Algol68 in its complete implementation. I feel this language adresses a lot of important language contructs which have been left half- baked in a lot of languages. Extensions to Algol68 such as enum types and better tasking are well within the reports scope (2.1.1 I think?) and I feel the language is the right base to do work in many areas. Does anyone know of implementations that run under UNIX? I see the EEC has adopted UNIX as the standard os for the future so ICL can't be far from porting it. Who out there uses/used the language and how are you moved? Hedley Rainnie ihnp4!cmcl2!acf4!hkr4627 ihnp4!cmcl2!alaya!hedley NYU Brain Research Labs
rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (02/21/85)
> I am a fan of Algol68 in its complete implementation. I feel this language > adresses a lot of important language contructs which have been left half- > baked in a lot of languages... I think ALGOL 68 HAD a lot to offer. Unfortunately, it now offers very little. The distinction lies in the difference between language definition and language implementation. The LANGUAGE had a lot to offer, but programmers use IMPLEMENTATIONS of a language, not the language itself. There were never any generally available implementations of ALGOL 68 in the U.S. which were of usable quality for production software. The few that I ever saw were university-research toy systems, and unfortunately they failed to evolve. A good implementation can make a poor language bearable (with possible exceptions for COBOL and a few others:-). A poor implementation can make the best of languages hard to use. Lack of an implementation can kill any language--almost no project can afford the lead time, let alone the effort, to develop a compiler before it produces the intended product. -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.
iwm@icdoc.UUCP (Ian Moor) (02/26/85)
In article <1105@opus.UUCP> rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) writes: >I think ALGOL 68 HAD a lot to offer. Unfortunately, it now offers very >little. The distinction lies in the difference between language definition >and language implementation. The LANGUAGE had a lot to offer, but >programmers use IMPLEMENTATIONS of a language, not the language itself. >There were never any generally available implementations of ALGOL 68 in the >U.S. which were of usable quality for production software. The few that I >ever saw were university-research toy systems, and unfortunately they >failed to evolve. CDC produced a very good implemedntation for their machines, even including the (simulated) parallel clauses an semaphores. It had some minor differences from the standard and a very powerful separate compilation facility with cross modulr typecheck if you wanted. RSRE (the Royal Signals Research Establishment) have a portable version ALGOL68-RS. I used the precusror ALGOL68R which was running in 1972 and was very impressed by the speed and usablity (68R ran on ICL 1900's) there is a rumour that one site reported a bug early on and was told that the bug was classified ( wish I could classify some of the bugs in my programs :-). University of Cambridge produce ALGOL 68C which is portable - there are versions running on IBM/370 and DEC 10 and a cross compiler to Z80 ! This version has no garbage collection ( neither does Pascal) and no direct access transput (thats IO to non '68 programmers). Rememember "Programming's great in '68" -- Ian W. Moor The squire on the hippopotamus is equal Department of Computing to the sons of the other two squires. 180 Queensgate London SW7 Uk.
smk@axiom.UUCP (Steven M. Kramer) (02/26/85)
sh and adb were written in ALGOL, so there must be something out
there. -:)
--
--steve kramer
{allegra,genrad,ihnp4,utzoo,philabs,uw-beaver}!linus!axiom!smk (UUCP)
linus!axiom!smk@mitre-bedford (MIL)