> On Dec 4, 2020, at 12:38 AM, Josh Dersch via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 6:13 PM Kevin Jordan via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
>> ...
>> The problem we're experiencing with ALGOL appears to be a glaring compiler
>> bug, but the compiler was distributed widely through DECUS, and it is
>> difficult to imagine that it would have been released with an obvious bug,
DECUS just distributed what it was given; there is no QA or review process. If
the author submitted bad code, nothing DECUS would do would get in the way.
> .... We suspect that this compiler just has a lot of bugs.
>
> Note also that Appendix E (page E-1) suggests that ALL 'END' statements be
> followed by a ";". This seemed to help at least with getting the compiler
> to stop giving us errors. Note that despite this suggestion, the examples
> in Appendix E fail to follow this guideline.
That's certainly a pretty bizarre suggestion. It's legal code either way, but
in ALGOL (and PASCAL) semicolon is a separator, NOT a terminator, and the
suggestion makes it appear that the authors don't understand the language well
enough to know this. That clearly isn't a recipe for a reliable compiler.
I thought ALGOL-11 (by Barry Folsom) was derived from ALGOL-8. Maybe that's a
different ALGOL-8, or maybe I'm just confused. That ALGOL looks like a subset
of Burroughs extended ALGOL.
paul
