User talk:HughesJohn/Sandbox/ALGOL 68RS

First reference:

I.F. Currie "A Portable ALGOL 68 System" Proceedings of the Conference on Applications of Algol 68, University of East Anglia, March 22-25, 1976.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Applications_of_ALGOL_68.html?id=5KfrMAAACAAJ

From: http://www.multicians.org/site-avon.html

Martyn Thomas: SWURCC was the regional computer centre, based on the Bath University campus but serving the more demanding users from Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter and UWIST. We ran an ICL 2980, which had little software at first. Our users had been using Algol W on their ICL System 4 university services, but they asked SWURCC to provide Algol 68 instead. I located a possible project, based on the Algol 68RS front end from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern, with a code generator being written by two staff at Oxford University Computing Services. I persuaded ICL that they would pay for the staff to turn this into a real product, which they agreed to do so long as it had ICL "look and feel" and they could market it as an ICL product. So I ran the project, using staff at SWURCC, Malvern and Oxford. It was a great success.

[Martyn Thomas] When AUCC came along, they asked for a Multics version of the compiler. By this time, I had a team of five or six people at SWURCC who were wholly funded on commercial software development money, and they had some spare capacity, so I agreed we would write an Algol 68 compiler for AUCC. Jeff Rees ran the team, with Paul Rouse, Richard Wendland, David Jenkins and possibly one or two others (memory fails). It had some novel characteristics (for example, the garbage collector relied on the unusual structure of Multics addresses to recognise references, instead of maintaining a reference map of memory, and was extremely fast). Richard Wendland is able to go into far more detail than I could.

[Martyn Thomas] In the early 1980s, political pressure forced me to choose between making the commercially funded staff redundant (our success was seen as a threat by the local computer centre directors at several of our six customer universities!) or moving the team wholly out into industry, resigning, and setting up a software house. I chose the latter, assisted by David Bean who had been the operating systems team leader at SWURCC and was by 1982 the Development Manager at Logica VTS in Swindon. Together we founded Praxis in 1983, and most of the commercial staff from SWURCC transferred to Praxis. We continued to support the Multics Algol 68 compiler (free, as I recall) until the last Multics site stopped using it.

Indefinite extent procedures
I heard a rumor that this compiler supported routine values that outlasted the stack frame where they were produced. This would constitute a full-fledged functional language in my opinion. Am I wrong? — Preceding unsigned comment added by NormHardy (talk • contribs) 20:21, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Re: Closures and Algol68... The following discussion from the "Origins of Pythons functional features" page... cf. discussion at: http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/04/origins-of-pythons-functional-features.html

Anonymous - May 19, 2009 at 2:13 AM: Perhaps it's worth pointing out that Algol 68 has anonymous functions (but no closures).

Reply: Guido van Rossum May 19, 2009 at 6:56 AM: @reinierpost: really? No closures in Algol 68? What's your definition of closures? I'm pretty sure functions can reference variables in outer scopes, and functon objects can be passed around. What's missing for "closures"?

This would seem to suggest that Guido's Algol68 compiler from the Amsterdam-Compiler-Kit had full closures, hence python inherited them from the ACK.

NevilleDNZ (talk) 01:36, 26 June 2018 (UTC)