Re: Function name problem

["David A. Cobb" <superbiskit@home.com>]

David Starner wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 16 Jan 2000 22:48:51 GMT, David A. Cobb <superbiskit@home.com> wrote:
> >Those of us with gray beards and long if flaky memories may remember
> >"Algol '8x" (I don't recall the x).  An over-ambitious work by theorists
> >that was still around when Ada was being designed.  Had a lot of
> >symbology about user defined operators.  I could never read any of it.
> >'C' is hard enough to read.
> 
> Do you mean Algol 68? Sounds like a description of that language, and
> it would be "still around" when Ada was being designed (late 70's-early
> 80's). comp.lang.misc had someone pushing it as the alpha and omega
> of languages recently (to be fair, it was no more radically than many
> of us push Ada or the Perl people push Perl - it was only the language
> that made it memberable.)
> 
> --
> David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
> If you wish to strive for peace of soul then believe;
> if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
>    -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Actually, David, I did mean '83(?).  I doubt there was ever a compiler
for that one: I don't think it got beyond the pages of CACM.  Algol'68
was a pretty close ancestor of the Pascal/Ada family of syntax's.  As I
said, the 1980's attempt to update it seemed to get pretty bogged down
in just how radical it could be - with very formal semantics.

Since even the unsuccessful branches are part of any evolutionary tree,
it wouldn't surprise me if some of the lessons from that influenced the
Ada design team.  Algol was also more popular in Europe than in the US,
and the designers could have been closely familiar with the work.