[COFF] Algol68 (was Re: [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

[bakul at iitbombay.org (Bakul Shah)]

On Dec 16, 2020, at 8:08 PM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
> 
> Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if A68 had become the medium-level language of Unix, and Pascal had become the language of non-Unix, instead of both of them using C.

Funny how we seem to rehash the same things over the years!

In a 1988 comp.lang.misc thread when I expressed hope that "a major
subset of Algol 68 with a new and concise syntax (sort of like C's)
can make a very elegant, type safe and well rounded language.", Piet
van Oostrum[1] commented the combination of dynamic arrays *and*
unions forced the use of GC in Algol68. Either feature by themselves
wouldn't have required GC! The larger point being that compiler
complexity is "almost exponential" (his words) to the number of
added features. Piet and others also wrote that both Pascal and C
had left out a lot of the hard things in A68. So I doubt A68 or a
subset would have replaced C or Pascal in 70s-80s.

[My exposure to Algol68 was when I had stumbled upon Brailsford and
Walker's wonderful "Introductory Algol 68 programming" @ USC. After
having used PL/I, Pascal & Fortran the regularity of A68 was quite 
enticing but AFAIK no one used A68 at USC. I must admit I still like
it more than modern languages like Java, Go, Rust, C++, ...]

[1] Piet had implemented major parts of both A68 and A60.