ALGOL

ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language) is a family of imperative computerprogramming languages originally developed in the mid-1950s which greatly influenced many other languages.

Quotes

• Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form.
  • Robert Floyd, "The Paradigms of Programming", 1978 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 22 (8), August 1979: pp. 455–460.

• One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.
  • Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

• [ALGOL 60] is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
  • C. A. R. Hoare, Hints on Programming Language Design, December 1973.

• [ALGOL W] was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL.
  • C. A. R. Hoare, "The Emperor's Old Clothes", 1980 Turing Award lecture, Communications of the ACM 24 (2), (February 1981): pp. 75-83.

• The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style.
  • Gary Kildall (1986) Programmers at Work.

• There is an appreciated substance to the phrase "ALGOL-like" which is often used in arguments about programming, languages and computation. ALGOL appears to be a durable model, and even flourishes under surgery — be it explorative, plastic, or amputative.
  • Alan Perlis, "The Synthesis of Algorthmic Systems", 1966 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 14 (1), January 1967, pp. 1–9.