In article ,
(bill davidsen) writes:
| In article ,
| Carlo Razzeto wrote:
|
| | The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques
| | which put them into practice, the more is my amazement and admiration of
| | ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not
| | only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its
| | successors.
| | -- C.A.R. Hoare, "Hints on Programming Language Design", 1974
|
| Having done large (20k lines of code or more) projects in Ada and PL/I,
| I'll take PL/I thanks. I agree with Hoare on Algol-60, my first language
| after FORTRAN-II.

As with many of Hoare's aphorisms, it is blatantly false as stated
but true in essence. I have used only a few languages to write
new code of that size, but have a good dozen to write thousands of
lines (often as part of hundreds of thousand line projects). And
those languages include Algol 60, Fortran II and Algol 68!

Algol 60 was, indeed, way ahead of its time in many respects, and
IN THOSE RESPECTS his statement is true. But it was seriously
behind them in others, so much so that it was immensely painful for
even describing many of the classes of algorithm for which it was
intended. A prime example of that is the complete lack of any
matrix slicing facilities, which means that many linear algebra
algorithms are clearer in Fortran II than in Algol 60.

Pascal, of course, followed a similar path, which was why it never
made any serious inroads into the Fortran community, despite being
propagandised to hell and back again.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.