OT: ALGOL 60 at 60

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, May 17, 2020, DL Neil via Python-list wrote:
>ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and
>grandaddy of the programming family tree
>Back to the time when tape was king
>By Richard Speed 15 May 2020 at 09:47
>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/15/algol_60_at_60/

Boy does that bring back some memories :-).

ALGOL was the third programming language I learned after FORTRAN
and Assembly on the Bendix G-20 in early 1966.

I first learned ALGOL on G.E. time sharing, where input was paper
tape, although it didn't require loading the compilers from tape
so I never hat that pleasure.  I loved the block structure of ALGOL,
and started indenting FORTRAN so that the program logic stood out
even if FORTRAN didn't understand it.

...
>ALGOL was almost 'the machine language' for the Burroughs B6700 series (and
>similar) but concurring with the article, we regarded it as somewhat academic
>and majored in FORTRAN, COBOL, or both. (as distinct from those who defined
>ComSc as compiler writing, for whom ALGOL was a brilliant tool!)

I really got into ALGOL on a time sharing system using the
Burroughs B-5500 where ALGOL was the system's native language,
there was no Assembly Language per-se.  The OS MCP, (Master
Control Progam) was written entirely in ALGOL.  The FORTRAN
compiler generated ALGOL source, and I learned a lot looking at
the ALGOL output of the FORTRAN program.

Many of the programming methods I use today have their roots in
doing a lot of scientific programming in ALGOL on the B-5500,
then in BPL (Burroughs Programming Language) on Burroughs Medium
Systems, B-2500->B-4500.

Bill
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