ALGOL 58

ALGOL 58 is the first language in the ALGOL programming language family. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60; ALGOL 58 introduced the fundamental notion of compound statement, but it was restricted to control flow only, and it was not tied to identifier scope.

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The language was originally proposed to be called IAL (International Algebraic Language), but at a meeting in Z?rich in May 1958, IAL was rejected as an "'unspeakable' and pompous acronym" (Perlis, 1981), and ALGOL suggested instead, though not officially adopted until a year later. Unresolved disagreements also led to a plan to define two dialects, ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60.

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ALGOL 58 saw some implementation effort at IBM, but the effort was in competition with FORTRAN, and soon abandoned. It was also implemented at Dartmouth College on an LGP-30 but that implementation soon evolved into Algol 60.

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ALGOL 58's primary contribution was to later languages; it was used as a basis for JOVIAL, MAD, and NELIAC. It was also used during 1959 to publish algorithms in CACM, beginning a trend of using ALGOL notation in publication that continued for many years.

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ALGOL: ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language) is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which became the de facto standard way to report algorithms in print for almost the next 30 years. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRA...

Programming language: :An has been proposed. Please refer to it for large rewrites....

ALGOL 60: ALGOL 60 (short for ALGOrithmic Language 1960) The name ALGOL of the family is sometimes given in mixed case (Algol 60), and sometimes in all uppercase (ALGOL 68). Gave rise to many other programming languages, including BCPL, B, Pascal, Simula, C, and many others. ALGOL 58 introduced code blocks an...