Re: Hello - and where to begin?

My recollection was that no one ever successfully implemented ALGOL 68.  Am 
I incorrect?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Albert van der Horst" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 3:46 AM
Subject: Re: [colorforth] Hello - and where to begin?


> On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 01:12:10PM -0600, John R. Strohm wrote:
>> "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <[email protected]> said:
>> >Well ... I've always thought there really were only three innovative
>> >languages -- Lisp, APL and Forth. I view Haskell, ML, Prolog, Erlang, 
>> >and
>> >all the other functional languages as specialized dialects of Lisp.
>>
>> What you take as baseline determines what is innovative.
>>
>> FORTRAN was, without a doubt, innovative, when it came out.
>>
>> ALGOL was certainly innovative.  PASCAL was arguably innovative, in that 
>> it
>> provided a real data structuring facility, combined with strong typing, 
>> AND
>> it was designed to be compiled and linked in ONE PASS.
>>
>> I would argue that C was not particularly innovative: almost everything 
>> it
>> provided was already available in other languages.  (The exception, the
>> glorification of pointer arithmetic, is a misfeature, in my opinion.)
>
> My favorite is still Algol 68, because it was the first unification of
> all that was known and made sense. It is amazing what was all already in
> there, and how you could extend the language (e.g. basing complex
> numbers on reals, and you couldn't tell it wasn't a build in type)
> E.g. your pointer arithmetic could be done in Algol 68 with a small
> preambule. ( *pc++ would be .pd. pc where .pd. is a new bold word, like
> meaning "post incremented dereference" ). It is theoretically sound in
> the extreme, it caused a riot when after a few years a single ambiguity
> was discovered.
> What is unique to C is the unsafeness of its pointer arithmetic, and the
> misfeature of a trailing unary operator (++ , --) as a unique language
> syntax exception. And of course the miserable declaration syntax.
>
> What makes a great language is the balance. Algol 68 and Python.
> Then there are work horses. C++ and Forth and macro assembler.
>
> Groetjes Albert
>
> --
> Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
> Economic growth -- like all pyramid schemes -- ultimately falters.
> albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
>
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