Re: Not intended for use in medical,

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Jon said

>Well, yes, but this is more an explanation based on a symptom.  The
>real real reason is that A68 used a real formal specification based on
>W-grammars.  If not the implementors, then certainly the joe-average
>person looking into the language found this more or less impenetrable
>=> can't understand what it is => no hope of understanding how to use
>it => no desire to use it => no demand for it => no commercial
>pressure for compilers.


For the implementors, the formal report was great. I only wish that I
had something that easy to follow precisely for other languages. True,
there was a HUGE learning barrier, and only a few dozen people ever got
to the point of really knowing this document well (I was one, but then
I was chair of WG2.1, and chair of the Algol-68 mainteance committee
for a while, so I should hope so :-)

It was definitely NOT a document for beginners, or even reasonably
experienced experts. But people did not learn Algol-68 from the RR
anyway. They learned it, for example, from the very nice 70 page yellow
book that came with the Algol-68R compiler -- an easy evening's read --
I only wish there were something equivalent for Ada ...

But people do not really get interested in a language until there are
implementations around, and implementations only appear if there are
commercial interests in funding such implementations. Algol-68 was,
as are most modern languages, not the kind of language that someone
can write a compiler for in their spare time -- several tried and
failed, although a couple of the non-funded compilers (algol-68S
and algol-68C -- the latter from Steve Bourne of the Bourne shell --
that's why the Bourne shell is a68 like) were quite successful.