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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2024 14:11:44 +0200
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On 07.04.2024 15:43, Andy Walker wrote:
> 
>     I agree;  OTOH, WG2.1 accepted A68 as the "new" Algol.  The
> instant question here was what an unadorned "Algol" means, and while
> I can see an argument for saying that it shouldn't happen, I can see
> no argument for saying that it, by default, refers to A60.

Well, after that other post I decided to explicitly differentiate them
per year suffix to not confuse anyone. That's okay for me. (OTOH I just
notice that I missed to identify "Simula" as "Simula 67"; there's also
"Simula I". But in case of Simula it's anyway more of a version.[*])

> 
>> But Algol 60, Simula, and also Algol 68 are all meaningless today, I
>> (sadly) dare to say.
> 
>     You're probably right.  But A68G is still a nice language.  It
> creaks in places, and it's not suitable for everything [what is?].  But
> it serves all my programming needs.  It has the advantage, in practice,
> over C that all the common programming blunders -- use of uninitialised
> variables, array accesses out of bounds, numerical overflow, dereferencing
> null pointers, memory leaks and consequences thereof, the things that
> cause most of the security holes -- are picked up either by the compiler
> or at run-time before they can do any damage.  I expect there are modern
> languages that also do that, but at my age it's not worth learning a new
> language when the old one works perfectly well.

Yes, indeed.

Janis

[*] Nice fact, BTW, that you can compile (almost all) Algol 60
programs with Simula 67 - Algol 60 is [mostly] a subset - but not
with Algol 68, which is a different language.