[TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code

[dot@dotat.at (Tony Finch)]

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Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> I can certainly confirm that Steve Bourne not only knew Algol 68, he
> was quite an evangelist for it.  When he came to the labs, he got a
> number of people, including me, to plough through the Algol 68 report,
> probably the worst written introduction to anything Ive ever read. 

This is a bit off topic, sorry, but a couple more Algol 68 observations...

> They were firmly convinced they were breaking new ground and
> consequently invented new terms for all kinds of otherwise familiar
> ideas.  It was as if the report had been written in Esperanto...  

Or maybe Latin with the way it inflects words e.g. the -ETY suffix being
sort for "or empty", i.e. an optional thing. Though I don't know what
would be a good comparison for all the elision, e.g. MOID = MODE or VOID,
MODINE = MODE or ROUTINE. (a MODE is what they call a type...)

There's a nicely te-typeset version at
http://www.eah-jena.de/~kleine/history/languages/Algol68-RevisedReport.pdf

The other classic of Algol 68 literature was the Informal Introduction, in
which the structure of the book was arranged in two orthogonal dimensions.
The table of contents is a sight to behold.

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/book/Lindsey_van_der_Meulen-IItA68-Revised-ContentsOnly.pdf

One of my ex-colleagues (now retired) was Chris Cheney, who worked with
Steve Bourne on the Algol 68C project. I think it was on that project
where he invented his beautiful compacting copying garbage collector
algorithm.

Tony.
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