Re: Enumerated data types

In article <141425@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> grover@brahmand.Eng.Sun.COM (Vinod Grover) writes:
>In article <3621@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.OZ.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>>Algol 68 was the first language I met that allowed overloading, but from
>>the published discussions of the Algol 68 committee overloading was already
>>a well known idea then. Anyone know where it first showed up? ...


>I believe that Christopher Strachey used the term "ad hoc polymorphism" to
>refer to a breed of overloading. I *think* that was before Algol 68.


>Vinod Grover
---


Many languages that supported overloading were designed before ALGOL 68.
MAD supported user-defined operator overloading. The operators were
defined by giving assembly code for their implementation. Aad van
Wijgaarden's paper "a Generalization of ALGOL" described a language that
supported overloading through user-defined rewriting rules. The form of
overloading provided in ALGOL 68 pales by comparison.


During the early development of ALGOL 68, the ALGOL committee planned to
produce two languages, ALGOL X and ALGOL Y. ALGOL X was to be a small
change to ALGOL 60 to fix its few remaining bugs. ALGOL Y was to be the
long-term solution. ALGOL X originally did not support extensibility.
Eventually, the ALGOL committee decided to retrofit retrofit some of the
advanced features from ALGOL Y to ALGOL X.


Yours truly,
Bob Corbett
--

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