:: [DNG] OT: Algol w, 68, Pascal, Ada
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Author: Hendrik Boom
Date:  
To: dng
Old-Topics: Re: [DNG] Studying C as told. (For help)
Subject: [DNG] OT: Algol w, 68, Pascal, Ada
On Mon, Jul 04, 2016 at 06:32:38AM +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:
> Le 03/07/2016 23:17, Hendrik Boom a écrit :
> >On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 01:36:14PM -0400, Peter Olson wrote:
> >
> >>Can I download your compiler that fixes all my mistakes? I could really use such a tool.
> >Yes, as a matter of fat you can -- almost.
> >
> >Two languages I use have the property that once the program gets
> >through the compiler, almost all the bugs are gone.
> >
> >Modula 3.
> >OCaml.
> >
> >Algol 68 is another one, but Algol 68 compilers are as scarce as hen's
> >teeth nowdays.
> >
> >
>     Ada also. BTW, Ada is considered a descendant of Pascal, which is a
> descendant of Algol68 :-)


More a relative. Wirth made a proposal for a language, van Wijngaarden
made a proposal for a defining formalism. Algol 68 was the result of
merging the language ideas with the formalism, generalising wherever
that worked, and imposing orthogonal design principles to simplify
everytthing conceptually.

Wirth was sufficienly upset with the result that he implemented a
variant of his original design, quickly, acoiding whatever was tricky
to implement, and called it Algol W. He made all caracter strings
fixed-length (which ws diffeent from his original proposal. Later
he made Pascal. I'd call Pascal a descendant of Algol W rather than of
Algol 68. Pascal had an easier syntax to parse, simpler parameter
passing conventions, and required array sizes to be statically
determined,

It ignored most of the new ideas introduced by Algol 68.

>     Ada is generally used when human life is at stake - planes, rockets, air
> traffic control, automatic vehicles.


Ada resembled Pascal syntactically, but had very different semantics.
For one thing, it was type-safe. Pascal wasn't. I'm not sure
I'd really call it a descendant.

-- hendrik