ALOGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) emerged from a joint committee of European and American programming language experts that was set up with the aim of producing a common language (Wexelblat 1981). The language was originally called IAL (INTERNATIONAL ALGEBRAIC LANGUAGE), but later became known as ALGOL. The committee's first product, usually known as ALGOL'58, was never implemented but the criticisms directed at it resulted in the development and implementation of ALGOL'60 (introduced in 1960). Although this language never attained wide spread usage no other language (including FORTRAN) has had such a profound impact on programming language design and definition. The initial report on ALGOL'60 (Naur 1960), and the subsequent revised report (Naur 1963), are considered to be major events in the history of programming languages. The biggest advantage of ALGOL (over preceding languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL is that it encourages the production of well structured programs.
ALGOL'60 was intended as a reference and publication language as well as a language for writing programs to run on computers. This led to its use by, amongst others, the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to communicate algorithms between users. However, although the language offered more powerful facilities than those available in FORTRAN, it was unable to supersede FORTRAN as the main scientific language. Wilson and Clark (1993) list the following reasons for this:
Created and maintained by Frans Coenen. Last updated 03 July 2001