Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

Algol 68 was a bit before my time, but c.1980 we did learn Algol W (W=Wirth) at Bristol Uni., which was Niklaus Wirth's idea of what Algol 68 should have been, and a predeceesor to Pascal, Modula-2, etc.

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ninalanyon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apart from it being an interesting technical challenge or hobby is there any mundane practical reason for creating An Algol 68 compiler?

	▲	snovymgodym an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'd love to be corrected, but my intuition tells me probably not. The only pragmatic use for a modern Algol 68 compiler I can think of would be to port a legacy codebase to a modern system, but any existing Algol 68 codebase will likely see greater porting challenges arising out of the operating system change than from the programming language.

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Rochus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I prefer Simula 67 ;-)

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srean 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Modula-2 happened way before my time but was quite taken by it. Especially it's fibres/coroutine features.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688380

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mrweasel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Apparently the Russian Glonass satellites are programmed in Modula-2 [1] which seems like a wild choice.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2#Russian_radionavigati...

	▲	bonzini 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In 1999 I used Modula-2 for my first computer science/programming languages exam at university. The environment was a bit like Turbo Pascal 3.0, though with a more complete language (TP3 had no modules/units) and library, comparable perhaps to TP5.
	▲	pjmlp an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well, back in the 1980's up to early 90's, Modula-2 enjoyed a mild success in Europe. Given that it was available in 1978, and the satellites launched in 1982, it seems a plausible choice like any other, given the computing ecosystem at the time.

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Smalltalker-80 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, that Algol code is not very pretty :-). I'm sticking with my namesake from 1980...

	▲	mhd 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One thing I always liked about some older languages was being able to have blanks in identifiers. Although I see that they actually managed to invent a new stropping variant that doesn't work with that… For the "kids"…