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eslaught10/02/20242 repliesview on HN

I wrote a small program in Algol 68 once. It was horrible because it didn't even have heap allocation in the language, so things you'd think of doing in C (e.g., tree data structures) just didn't work. That and all the compiler errors were pure numerical codes which you had to go look up in the manual (not provided). And forget about getting line numbers.

I am very much glad I wasn't alive at the time this was the state of the art.


Replies

bigger_cheese10/02/2024

I ported some Algol code into C years ago, despite being completely unfamiliar with Algol I found code very easy to understand.

Found the paper with original code here, it's for a Reinsch spline: https://tlakoba.w3.uvm.edu/AppliedUGMath/auxpaper_Reinsch_19...

pdw10/02/2024

You're probably thinking of Algol 60? Algol 68 definitely had heap operations, the sample code on Wikipedia even showcases them to build linked lists.