ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language)[1] is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages, and became the de facto way algorithms were described in text-books and academic works for almost the next 30 years. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages (including Pascal). ALGOL uses bracketed statement blocks and was the first language to use begin end pairs for delimiting them. Fragments of ALGOL-like syntax are sometimes still used as a notation for algorithms, so-called Pidgin Algol.
There are three official main branches of ALGOL family:
Niklaus Wirth based his own Algol-W on ALGOL 60, before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL, but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned, simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published.
Last update: 2008-05-05 14:45:50 Algol 60 | Copyright 2008 HubHip.com