Hi George,

-=> On 05 Feb 97  09:25:00 George White said to Andrew Grillet <=-

 GW> ALGOL-68 was the revision of the language. 

Total absolute complete revision. Much better in almost every respect.

 GW> The original version was
 GW> ALGOL-60 (which incidentally was the first programming language I
 GW> learned). 


I wrote some stuff in Algo-60 too. Mainly AFAICR some stuff for x-rar
crystallography which was used as a library mostly by programs written in
Fortran (On ICL1900's).

 GW> It was (and I suspect still is) one of the best designed
 GW> general purpose computer languages but, as you say, IBM had one of
 GW> their bouts of NIH and created PL/1, though I dispute the fact it had
 GW> all the defects of other known languages. 

OK, I concede it did not have some of the worst features of SNOBOL and LISP.

 GW> It certainly did not inherit
 GW> my pet hate in FORTRAN and BASIC, automatic declarations. I've wasted
 GW> more time tracing problems with mis-typed variable names than any other
 GW> single error in FORTRAN code I've had to maintain.

Me too.

 GW> Algol-68 is supposed to be available for OS/2, but I don't know anyone
 GW> who has it.

I did try.

Andrew



... "I believe OS/2...to be the most important OS...of all time" Gates '87
--- Blue Wave/Max v2.30 [NR]