Steve Johnson 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. -- f.anthony.n.finch http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode Trafalgar: North 5 to 7, occasionally 4 at first. Slight or moderate, becoming rough or very rough except in far southeast. Occasional rain. Moderate or good.