geoff (10/27/82)
For a start, there were two Algol 68 reports: the original and the revised. The original is no longer of interest since it contains errors and inelegancies which were eliminated in the revised report. Our local DECsystem-10 has release 1.271 of the Algol 68C (Cambridge subset) implementation (no source, apparently). Steve Bourne of Bell Labs was involved in the 68C effort which has produced a `portable' compiler. Ported compilers may be available for some machines. The address to write is Algol 68 Distribution Computer Lab Corn Exchange St. Cambridge, England There are allegedly compilers for UNIX available from USENIX and Bob Constable of Cornell's CS Dept, but I haven't investigated these, so I can't say for sure. My apologies if I'm wrong. The ``original'' Revised Report has been (re)printed in SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 12, No. 5, May 1977 which also contains the Algol 68S (the official subset) report and the report on standard hardware representation. informal introduction to algol 68, Revised Edition by C.H. Lindsey & S.G. van der Meulen is the official introduction to the language, as sanctioned by IFIP Working Group 2.1 which produced the Algol 68 reports. Published by North-Holland, ISBN 0 7204 0726 5. A Practical Guide to Algol 68 by Frank G. Pagan, ISBN 0 471 65747 6 (paperback), published by Wiley, is a really good tutorial introduction. If I remember correctly, it could serve as a beginning programming text yet didn't bore me to shreds. Geoff Collyer, U. of Toronto Computing Services