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ALGOL 60 confidential

Knuth, Donald E. and Merner, Jack N. (1961) ALGOL 60 confidential. Communications of the ACM, 4 (6). pp. 268-272. ISSN 0001-0782. doi:10.1145/366573.366599. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20161117-131418165

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Abstract

The ALGOL 60 Report, when first encountered, seems to describe a very complex language which will be difficult to learn. The “metalinguistic formulae” admirably serve the purpose of precisely specifying a language, but they are certainly not very readable for a beginner. However, experience has shown that once the report is explained it is in fact easy to learn ALGOL and to write algorithms in it. The language is so general and powerful it can handle an enormous class of problems. It is not hard to learn those parts of ALGOL present in other compiler languages: how to write assignment and go to and for statements, etc. Indeed, a lot of the unnecessary restrictions imposed by other compiling languages have finally been lifted. But ALGOL also allows many unobvious things to be written, as we will see later, and herein lies a problem: ALGOL seems to have become too general. So many restrictions have been lifted that a lot of technical details crop up which are hard to learn and to use correctly. In this paper some of the more obscure features of the language are considered and their usefulness is discussed. Remarks are based on the authors' interpretations of the ALGOL 60 Report.


Item Type:Article
Related URLs:
URLURL TypeDescription
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/366573.366599DOIArticle
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=366573.366599PublisherArticle
Additional Information:© 1961 ACM.
Issue or Number:6
DOI:10.1145/366573.366599
Record Number:CaltechAUTHORS:20161117-131418165
Persistent URL:https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20161117-131418165
Official Citation:Donald E. Knuth and Jack N. Merner. 1961. ALGOL 60 confidential. Commun. ACM 4, 6 (June 1961), 268-272. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/366573.366599
Usage Policy:No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided.
ID Code:72129
Collection:CaltechAUTHORS
Deposited By:INVALID USER
Deposited On:17 Nov 2016 21:21
Last Modified:11 Nov 2021 04:56

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