Paul Koning > It would be great to learn more about that. It's a rather early machine > for ALGOL to show up there, though a precedessor of ALGOL (IAL, > "International Algebraic Language") appeared in 1958. That was a bit of a > mess and the 1960 Report on ALGOL-60 is quite different. Apparently IAL > served as the inspiration for JOVIAL, though in my view the designer of > JOVIAL clearly demonstrated that he didn't at all understand the core > principles of IAL or ALGOL.
I had the pleasure of using JOVIAL on one of the F-16 subsystems. I recall its "A" type, a kind of user-defined fixed type (where you controlled the amount of precision/resolution you needed). On Sun, Feb 16, 2025 at 8:32 AM Paul Koning <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Feb 15, 2025, at 11:24 PM, Steve Lewis via cctalk < > [email protected]> wrote: > > > > I'm not very familiar with ALGOL, but just today I met someone at VCF who > > has essentially built a replica of the LGP-30 (in FPGA form, more on that > > to come down the road, but it is a system from 1955/1956). Then related > to > > that, two different people mentioned to me of an early ALGOL compiler > being > > available for the LGP-30. I don't know if that was of a form to be > > considered any kind of "block structure" as you mentioned. > > It would be great to learn more about that. It's a rather early machine > for ALGOL to show up there, though a precedessor of ALGOL (IAL, > "International Algebraic Language") appeared in 1958. That was a bit of a > mess and the 1960 Report on ALGOL-60 is quite different. Apparently IAL > served as the inspiration for JOVIAL, though in my view the designer of > JOVIAL clearly demonstrated that he didn't at all understand the core > principles of IAL or ALGOL. > > A lot of early "ALGOL" compilers did major subsetting because it was > considered to hard to do the real language. Those subsets may not actually > bear any real resemblance to the actual language. For example, a "subset" > that omits recursion is not ALGOL but rather a mongrel joke. > > One of the major contributions of Dijkstra and Zonneveld isn't just that > they built the first compiler for the full ALGOL-60, but that they invented > all the major compiler construction mechanisms to make that possible. This > is analyzed very well and in impressive detail in the Ph.D. Thesis of > Gauthier van den Hove. > > paul > >
