ALGOL was the first high-level language I learned, on a Burroughs B5500. I liked it a lot, except that it was "special character happy", using the full 64-character set found on the model 029 & 129 keypunches.
The college only had four 029's (that students could use) but they had a bunch of model 026, 48 character set keypunches all over campus. Most of us got to be very good at multi-punching.... The best "learning language" I ever ran across was COMAL... Randy -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Andrews Sent: Monday, September 30, 2013 4:12 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Quote on Slashdot.org On Mon, 2013-09-30 at 19:40 +0000, Pew, Curtis G wrote: > Tony Hoare once said, "The amazing thing about Algol was it was such > an improvement over most of its successors." Not having a defined I/O facility didn't help Algol. An undergraduate prof of mine (George Haynam, did the SDS Algol 60 compiler) claimed that this was the source of Algol's unpopularity in the US. Maybe he was right. -- David Andrews A. Duda & Sons, Inc. [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
