ALGOL 60 was the first programming language to be designed completely from the bottom-up by computer scientists. It came about in large part because IBM, the owner of the FORTRAN programming language that was created in 1957, refused to relinquish proprietary control over what it considered to be its sole property. This lack of freedom in developing FORTRAN forced the scientific computing community of the late 1950s to seek to develop another language, which would improve on FORTRAN and remedy its problems, and yet be free of the shackles that corporate ownership entailed.
Early programming languages were highly machine-specific. Quite a few of them would only run on hardware built by a specific manufacturer--for instance, FORTRAN would only run on IBM's machines. A client who purchased the machine from a hardware manufacturer would also be obliged to purchase the compiler for that language only from that manufacturer, so as to be able to compile any code written in that language. This dependence made for some very unsatisfied customers, and resulted in the demand for a universal programming language that could be compiled on any existing hardware.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in the United States, and the West German Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (abbreviated GAMM based on the German name) agreed to come together to attempt the creation of such a programming language. A six-day meeting was held in Zurich, Switzerland, from May 27th to June 1st, 1958, with the aim of deciding the terms of this project.
The aims of the language as stated at that meeting were quite laudable. The meeting aimed at the creation of a language whose syntax was as close as possible to standard mathematical notation, and which could be used, besides programming, for describing computing processes in written publications. Since most computer scientists of the time had been educated in mathematics, and since mathematical computation was the single most important use of computers in those days, these objectives were considered to be most important.
The language that was born as a result of that meeting was called the "International Algorithmic Language (IAL)." This name was thought to be a mouthful, however, so the simpler version ALGOL 58 (standing for ALGOrithmic Language) was adopted, where the numerals indicated the year of the language's birth. The language gained wide acceptance, except by IBM, the owner of FORTRAN, which saw it as a threat to its corporate success.
Two years later, in 1960, a second meeting took place in Paris, which was intended to improve the language further based on all that had been learned since the first meeting. Peter Naur (of the Backus-Naur Form) of Denmark was invited to the meeting, and played a role in its success. The variant of the language that grew out of the second meeting was called ALGOL 60.
ALGOL 60 is an important programming language, although no longer used. It is important for its history as the first ever second-generation programming language, and for being the first to introduce many important programming language concepts, such as that of the block structure of a program. The block structure as a method of segmenting the scope of the variables and control statements was an important development in programming but had never been previously considered. The concept of the data type of a variable was also first described in ALGOL 60--a variable was assumed to be of floating-point type, and any other type had to be explicitly declared in the preamble to the executable code.
Recursive procedures and stack dynamic arrays were other firsts for ALGOL 60--these were not available even in its previous variant, ALGOL 58. Recursive procedures are those where a function is able to call itself within its own body. Stack dynamic arrays are an abstract data type that allows the programmer to define the range of the subscripts for the array (i.e., the size of the array) to be determined at runtime based on the results of computations.
The original motive behind the creation of ALGOL 60 was that it be used as a full-fledged, complete programming language for scientific computation. (It should be rememebered that back in the late fifties and early sixties, only scientists used computers; there was nothing corresponding to what we would now call personal or business computing.) During its all-too-brief tenure in the early to mid sixties as a vibrant programming language, ALGOL 60 was used by research computer scientists in America and also across the pond in Western Europe.
Unfortunately, with experience it started to become obvious that beyond helping perform some very theoretical computations like calculating the value of the mathematical constant , ALGOL 60 was of very limited use. It lacked many features that have since become common in all programming languages--such as standard features for input and output. During ALGOL 60's own lifetime, business applications began to grow in importance, even replacing scientific computation as the primary application domain for programming. As ALGOL 60 had been created by scientists--theoreticians with no business experience and no feel for the needs of industry and commerce--it was grossly inadequate as a tool for creating business applications. ALGOL 60 was also a language that achieved a measure of aesthetic grace in theoretical terms, but did little to encourage or enable the programmer to produce quality code at high rates of speed.
For all these reasons, the language, which had been obtained with such lofty goals, passed from the domain of the practical to being an important history lesson for all students of programming to come.
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