ALGOL 60
| Paradigm | procedural, imperative, structured |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Backus, Bauer, Green, Katz, McCarthy, Naur, Perlis, Rutishauser, Samelson, van Wijngaarden, Vauquois, Wegstein, Woodger |
| First appeared | 1960 |
| Influenced by | |
| ALGOL 58 | |
| Influenced | |
| Most subsequent imperative languages (so-called ALGOL-like languages), e.g. Simula, CPL, Pascal, Ada, C | |
ALGOL 60 (short for ALGOrithmic Language 1960) is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them. ALGOL 60 was the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including CPL, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal and C.
Niklaus Wirth based his own ALGOL W on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published. Algol 68 is substantially different from Algol 60 and was criticised partially for being so, so that in general "Algol" refers to dialects of Algol 60.
ALGOL 60 — with COBOL — were the first languages to seek standardization.
ALGOL 60 was used mostly by research computer scientists in the United States and in Europe. Its use in commercial applications was hindered by the absence of standard input/output facilities in its description and the lack of interest in the language by large computer vendors. ALGOL 60 did however become the standard for the publication of algorithms and had a profound effect on future language development.
John Backus developed the Backus normal form method of describing programming languages specifically for ALGOL 58. It was revised and expanded by Peter Naur for ALGOL 60, and at Donald Knuth's suggestion renamed Backus–Naur form.
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