2.5.4 Reception of the ALGOL 58 Report
In December 1958, publication of the ALGOL 58 report (Perlis and Samelson,
1958) was greeted with a good deal of enthusiasm. In the United States, the new
language was viewed more as a collection of ideas for programming language
design than as a universal standard language. Actually, the ALGOL 58 report
was not meant to be a finished product but rather a preliminary document for
international discussion. Nevertheless, three major design and implementation
efforts used the report as their basis. At the University of Michigan, the MAD
language was born (Arden et al., 1961). The U.S. Naval Electronics Group pro-
duced the NELIAC language (Huskey et al., 1963). At System Development
Corporation, JOVIAL was designed and implemented (Shaw, 1963). JOVIAL,
an acronym for Jules’ Own Version of the International Algebraic Language,
represents the only language based on ALGOL 58 to achieve widespread use
( Jules was Jules I. Schwartz, one of JOVIAL’s designers). JOVIAL became
widely used because it was the official scientific language for the U.S. Air Force
for a quarter century.
The rest of the U.S. computing community was not so kind to the new lan-
guage. At first, both IBM and its major scientific user group, SHARE, seemed
to embrace ALGOL 58. IBM began an implementation shortly after the report
was published, and SHARE formed a subcommittee, SHARE IAL, to study the
language. The subcommittee subsequently recommended that ACM standard-
ize ALGOL 58 and that IBM implement it for all of the 700-series computers.
The enthusiasm was short-lived, however. By the spring of 1959, both IBM
and SHARE, through their Fortran experience, had had enough of the pain
and expense of getting a new language started, both in terms of developing and
using the first-generation compilers and in terms of training users in the new
language and persuading them to use it. By the middle of 1959, both IBM and
SHARE had developed such a vested interest in Fortran that they decided to
retain it as the scientific language for the IBM 700-series machines, thereby
abandoning ALGOL 58.2.5.5 ALGOL 60 Design Process
During 1959, ALGOL 58 was furiously debated in both Europe and the United
States. Large numbers of suggested modifications and additions were published
in the European ALGOL Bulletin and in Communications of the ACM. One of the
most important events of 1959 was the presentation of the work of the Zurich
committee to the International Conference on Information Processing, for
there Backus introduced his new notation for describing the syntax of program-
ming languages, which later became known as BNF (Backus-Naur form). BNF
is described in detail in Chapter 3.
In January 1960, the second ALGOL meeting was held, this time in Paris.
The purpose of the meeting was to debate the 80 suggestions that had been
formally submitted for consideration. Peter Naur of Denmark had become
heavily involved in the development of ALGOL, even though he had not been2.5 The First Step Toward Sophistication: ALGOL 60 55