ALGOL 58 in the context of ALGOL


ALGOL 58 in the context of ALGOL

ALGOL 58 Study page number 1 of 1

Play TriviaQuestions Online!

or

Skip to study material about ALGOL 58 in the context of "ALGOL"


⭐ Core Definition: ALGOL 58

ALGOL 58, originally named IAL, is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60. According to John Backus:

ALGOL 58 introduced the fundamental notion of the compound statement, but it was restricted to control flow only, and it was not tied to identifier scope in the way that Algol 60's blocks were.

↓ Menu
HINT:

In this Dossier

ALGOL 58 in the context of ALGOL 60

ALGOL 60 (short for Algorithmic Language 1960) is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a key advance in the rise of structured programming. ALGOL 60 was one of the first languages implementing function definitions (that could be invoked recursively). ALGOL 60 function definitions could be nested within one another (a feature introduced by ALGOL 60) with lexical scope. It gave rise to many other languages, including CPL, PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, and C. Practically every computer of the era had a systems programming language based on ALGOL 60 concepts.

Niklaus Wirth based his own ALGOL W on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published. ALGOL 68 is substantially different from ALGOL 60 and was criticised partially for being so, so that in general "ALGOL" refers to dialects of ALGOL 60.

View the full Wikipedia page for ALGOL 60
↑ Return to Menu