Re: The History of the ALGOL Effort

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:


>> this month I have completed my Master thesis in Computer Science and
>> Engineering about the history of the ALGOL effort.
>
> Any comments on ALGOL W? Does it fit into your history?


I searched through the PDF file, looking for ALGOL W, but it is not
mentioned as far as I can see. Niklaus Wirth and all the other names
which appear as authors of papers are mentioned several times, of
course. The author really goes into interesting details in many
places. But nothing about ALGOL W.


> I have for a while been trying to track down the ALGOL W compiler
> that Wirth wrote for S/360 some years ago at Stanford.
>
> As far as I can tell, it is now lost, but I keep asking just in case.


In the mid-80s, our computer science professor still told us war
stories about the mid-60s and he mentioned ALGOL W in particular as a
chance that had been missed.


Niklaus Wirth (in his Turing Award Lecture) also mentioned ALGOL W
several times.


> [Algol W was basically a tweaked version of Algol 60. I gather that
> one faction wanted to do a minor upgrade of Algol 60, another faction
> wanted to do something all new and wonderful, and the latter faction
> won. -John]


Yes, that's what our professor also told us 20 years ago.
[Well, yeah, I actually used Algol W in about 1970, although I preferred
PL360, the Algol-syntax assembler he wrote to implement Algol W. -John]

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