Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

On 06.04.2024 20:32, Andy Walker wrote:

On 06/04/2024 17:57, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

I named it always explicitly as "Algol 60" and "Algol 68".
But at some instance of time I read somewhere that "Algol"
would "now" refer to Algol 68, so I changed my habit.

 
    Quite right.  Algol 60 died, for all practical purposes,
half a century ago.  Algol 68 may be a niche interest, but it is
still a nice language, and its [dwindling] band of adherents and
practitioners still use it and prefer it to C and other more
recent languages.

I think it's a not only formally outstanding language; despite I've
never used it professionally since my first contact with it in the
early 1980's. (Though I still have a compiler on my private box to
play with it.)

 

But since [LD'O's] post shows that this may not (not yet?) be
common usage I'll be more specific in future. - Thanks for
the hint!

 
    For how long?  Does anyone still think that an unadorned
"Unix" must refer to 6th Edition [or earlier], "C" to K&R, "Fortran"
to Fortran IV, and so on?  Clearly, there /are/ occasions when it is
necessary to specify which version of a language/OS/computer/... is
being referred to, and there is often a change-over period of a few
years when an older version is still sufficiently current.  But fifty
years is surely long enough to get used to the newer version!

Yes. - What I didn't know was whether that generic "Algol" naming
convention was already made around 1968 or maybe only much later.

But, WRT Algol 60 vs. Algol 68, these are quite different languages;
I wouldn't call the latter a new version. While some basic abstract
concepts from Algol 60 have certainly been considered in Algol 68
the whole design and specification process was done anew in Algol 68.
(The van Wijngaarden grammar also was some fundamental new approach.)
These languages can hardly be seen as "versions" of the same language.

Algol 60, OTOH, also had an own history and continued use after 1968;
to my knowledge it had been used in numerical mathematics and it was
(while per se quite terse a language) the base of Simula 67, an
extremely powerful language ahead of time (still).

But Algol 60, Simula, and also Algol 68 are all meaningless today, I
(sadly) dare to say. Maybe more than of "niche interest"? Can't tell.
Back these days they certainly were not hyped (as languages nowadays
are as part of the inventor's "marketing" activities). There's papers
existing that try to explain the/possible reasons for their fail to
become established.

Janis