< language > ALGOrithmic Language 1960.
A portable language for scientific computations. ALGOL 60 was small and elegant. It was block-structured , nested, recursive and free form . It was also the first language to be described in BNF .
There were three lexical representations: hardware, reference, and publication. The only structured data types were arrays , but they were permitted to have lower bounds and could be dynamic. It also had conditional expressions ; it introduced :=; if-then-else; very general "for" loops; switch declaration (an array of statement labels generalising Fortran 's computed goto ). Parameters were call-by-name and call-by-value . It had static local "own" variables. It lacked user-defined types, character manipulation and standard I/O .
See also EULER , ALGOL 58 , ALGOL 68 , Foogol .
["Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60", Peter Naur ed., CACM 3(5):299-314, May 1960].
(1995-01-25)