BCPL in the context of P-code machine

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.

B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Though often mythologized that B derived from BCPL, Thompson created B from a stripped down Fortran source. Thompson began with the letter Z and after each revision, he decremented the name, one letter toward A. When finished, he landed on B. After Ritchie ported B to another machine, Ritchie called it new B, a tongue-in-cheek reference to newbie. That porting let Ritchie add types and structs. Doing that necessitated a bump up revision of the name to C. Later, when writing about C, Ritchie stated one could think of it like a BCPL and from that is the source of all origins confusion.

ALGOL (/ˈælɡɒl, -ɡɔːl/; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years.

In the sense that the syntax of most modern languages is "Algol-like", it was arguably more influential than three other high-level programming languages among which it was roughly contemporary: FORTRAN, Lisp, and COBOL. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, Ada, and C.

CPL (Combined Programming Language) is a multi-paradigm programming language developed in the early 1960s. It is an early ancestor of the C language via the BCPL and B languages.