On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:10:29AM +1100, Timothy S. Nelson wrote: : On Mon, 8 Mar 2010, Carl Mäsak wrote: : : >Meanwhile, the uncanny similarities between Perl 6 and Algol 68 : >continue to strike me: : > : ><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68> (]): : >] ALGOL 68 [...] was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming : >] language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more : >] rigorously defined syntax and semantics. : : Algol 68 is notorious as a failure. Let's hope things are : different here.
Algol 68 would have done much better had it been Open Source software written in some other ubiquitous language. But back then people thought you could sell computer languages, or at least proprietary compilers for computer languages. And there was no language sufficiently ubiquitous and sufficiently low cost to write a portable language in until C came along later. (You'll note that I did not, in fact, call C a portable language. :) Alternately, they probably would have bootstrapped Algol into its own ubiquitous language had the Open Source movement existed back then. History would have been much different. Incidentally, I programmed in Algol W on a Burroughs machine once, long, long ago in a galaxy far away... Larry
