Last updated 9 January 2026
Section 3 (pages 5-8) is "Algol and its Dialects".
Sections 2 through 4 of Chapter 1 contain historical material. Naur's HOPL paper quotes section 2 and the first two sections of section 3 to provide coverage of the events of which he lacked firsthand experience.
Hoare's ACM Turing Award Lecture. He discusses ALGOL 60, the Elliot 803 ALGOL compiler, IFIP WG2.1, ALGOL X, ALGOL W, and ALGOL 68.
Wirth's ACM Turing Award Lecture. He discusses ALGOL 58, NELIAC, ALGOL 60, and ALGOL 68, as well as the languages of his own design: Euler, ALGOL W, PL360, PASCAL, Modula, and Modula-2.
"After IFIP WG2.1 had been formed (initially from the original authors of ALGOL 60) a decision was taken in March 1964 to revive the ALGOL Bulletin, which had lain dormant since the publication of the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60 in 1962. Fraser Duncan was appointed as Editor, and AB16 duly appeared in May 1964. As present editor of the AB, I have no access to any issues prior to AB16, but I have managed to piece together a complete set since that date, and they form a fascinating account of what was going on in those years. The following article surveys some of the material published between 1964 and 1972."
Summarizes a meeting at the Science Museum recognizing the 30th anniversary of the first ALGOL 60 implementations, with presentations by Mike Woodger and David Hill on Algol standardization, followed by talks by Lawford Russell on Whetstone ALGOL for the English Electric KDF9, Jeff Hillmore on Elliot 803 ALGOL, and Richard de Morgan on DECsystem-10 ALGOL.
"In the 1950s, there was a good deal of discussion at computer conferences about what was then known as automatic programming. This led to Fortran, which was developed by a group within IBM who had strictly pragmatic aims. They saw a clear need for some system that would enable the labor of programming to be reduced. The scientific study of programming languages began slightly later with the publication of the Algol 60 report. This was put together by an international committee whose aims were essentially intellectual. They set out to design a language that was elegant in a mathematical sense and would enable scientists to specify a computation without concerning themselves about practical details. Together, Fortran and Algol define a fault line that runs through the study of programming languages that we are now only beginning to bridge."
"Abstract: In this oral history Edsger Dijkstra recounts his early education and training as a theoretical physicist and as a 'programmer'. Dijkstra describes his work developing software, and his activities at several early information processing conferences. Dijkstra also discourses on the development of ALGOL 60 and the origins of computing science in Europe and America."
A section covers Developing the World's First ALGOL 68 Compiler.
"Software for Europe proposes as a working hypothesis that, beyond the effort to define a new language, the culture of software co-entrepreneurship across borders represented by ALGOL helped to create a specifically European space for software."
Chapter 2 discusses the definition of ALGOL 60 and the MC ALGOL 60 compiler.
"I argue, however, that the transatlantic collaboration that would lead to the making of Algol was born from a shared concern within American and European computing centers: the need to foster information exchange between computing centers."
Chapter 9 is "The Algol Research Programme". The book is an extended version of Priestley's PhD thesis: Logic and the Development of Programming Languages, 1930-1975. University College London, May 2008.
"This paper describes some early contributions of E.W. Dijkstra by elaborating on his involvement in putting forward and implementing the recursive procedure as an ALGOL60 language construct."
Section 2.3 covers Hoare's Algol work at Elliot.
Part I covers Naur's work on Algol 60, including the DASK and GIER implementations. He also makes a few remarks about Algol 68.
"To understand what computer programming is, and how it should be done, Gauthier van den Hove proposes to study how it is actually done, and induce elements of method from factual observation. To this end, he carries out a detailed analysis of the first ALGOL 60 system. He carried out the research at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, where the system was originally designed and implemented." [Announcement for thesis defense, UvA, 2019]
"Through extensive archival research, this article shows how the relentless pursuit of a still better language that came to dominate the agenda of the Algol project brought to the fore the tension between the research-driven dimension of the project and the goal of developing a reliable programming language."