ALGOL 60

language ALGOrithmic Language 1960.

A portable language for scientific computations. ALGOL 60 was

small and elegant. It was block-structured, nested,

recursive and free form. It was also the first language

to be described in BNF.

There were three lexical representations: hardware,

reference, and publication. The only structured data types

were arrays, but they were permitted to have lower bounds

and could be dynamic. It also had conditional expressions;

it introduced :=; if-then-else; very general "for" loops;

switch declaration (an array of statement labels generalising

Fortran's computed goto). Parameters were call-by-name

and call-by-value. It had static local "own" variables.

It lacked user-defined types, character manipulation and

standard I/O.

See also EULER, ALGOL 58, ALGOL 68, Foogol.

["Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60", Peter Naur

ed., CACM 3(5):299-314, May 1960].

(1995-01-25)