ALGOL 60 Confidential

The ALGOL 60 Report,* when first encountered,
seems to describe a very complex language which 
will be difficult to learn.  The "metalinguistic formulae"
admirably serve the purpose of precisely specifying 
a language, but they are certainly not very readable
for a beginner.  However, experience has shown that 
once the report is explained it is in fact easy to learn
ALGOL and to write algorithms in it.  The language 
is so general and powerful it can handle an enormous
class of problems.  It is not hard to learn those 
parts of ALGOL present in other compiler languages: how
to write assignment and go to and for statements, 
etc.  Indeed, a lot of the unnecessary restrictions
imposed by other compiling languages have finally 
been lifted.  But ALGOL also allows many unobvious things
to be written, as we will see later, and herein 
lies a problem: ALGOL seems to have become too general.
 So many restrictions have been lifted that a 
lot of technical details crop up which are hard to learn
and to use correctly.  In this paper some of 
the more obscure features of the language are considered
and their usefulness is discussed.  Remarks 
are based on the authors' interpretations of the ALGOL 60 Report.

CACM June, 1961

Knuth, D. E.
Merner, J. N.

CA610604 JB March 16, 1978  10:48 PM

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