Systems programming language in the context of ALGOL 60

Systems programming language in the context of ALGOL 60

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⭐ Core Definition: Systems programming language

A system programming language is a programming language used for system programming; such languages are designed for writing system software, which usually requires different development approaches when compared with application software. Edsger Dijkstra referred to these languages as machine oriented high order languages, or mohol.

General-purpose programming languages tend to focus on generic features to allow programs written in the language to use the same code on different computing platforms. Examples of such languages include ALGOL and Pascal. This generic quality typically comes at the cost of denying direct access to the machine's internal workings, and this often has negative effects on performance.

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👉 Systems programming language 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.

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Programming language → System programming → System software → Edsger W. Dijkstra → General-purpose programming language → Computing platform → ALGOL → Pascal (programming language) →