ALGOL 68 - Quotes

Quotes

• ... The scheme of type composition adopted by C owes considerable debt to Algol 68, although it did not, perhaps, emerge in a form that Algol's adherents would approve of. The central notion I captured from Algol was a type structure based on atomic types (including structures), composed into arrays, pointers (references), and functions (procedures). Algol 68's concept of unions and casts also had an influence that appeared later. Dennis Ritchie Apr 1993.
• ... C does not descend from Algol 68 is true, yet there was influence, much of it so subtle that it is hard to recover even when I think hard. In particular, the union type (a late addition to C) does owe to A68, not in any details, but in the idea of having such a type at all. More deeply, the type structure in general and even, in some strange way, the declaration syntax (the type-constructor part) was inspired by A68. And yes, of course, "long". Dennis Ritchie, 18 June 1988
• "Congratulations, your Master has done it" - Niklaus Wirth
• The more I see of it, the more unhappy I become - E.W. Dijkstra, 1968
• it was said that A68's popularity was inversely proportional to the distance from Amsterdam - Guido van Rossum
• The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "... as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure." - C. A. R. Hoare in his Oct 1980 Turing Award Lecture
  • Their actual minority report quote from 1970: " More than ever it will be required from an adequate programming tool that it assists, by structure, the programmer in the most difficult aspects of his job, viz. in the reliable creation of sophisticated programs. In this respect we fail to see how the language proposed here is a significant step forward: on the contrary, we feel that its implicit view of the programmer's task is very much the same as, say, ten years ago. This forces upon us the conclusion that, regarded as a programming tool, the language must be regarded as obsolete. " Signed by: DIJKSTRA, DUNCAN, GARWICK, HOARE, RANDELL, SEEGMUELLER, TURSKI, WOODGER. And then on Dec. 23, 1968, Jan V. Garwick