- published: 27 Oct 2014
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ALGOL 60 (short for ALGOrithmic Language 1960) is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including BCPL, B, Pascal, Simula, C, and many others. ALGOL 58 introduced code blocks and the begin
and end
pairs for delimiting them. ALGOL 60 was the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope.
Niklaus Wirth based his own ALGOL W on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published.
ALGOL 68 is substantially different from Algol 60 and was criticised partially for being so, so that in general "Algol" refers to dialects of Algol 60. The name ALGOL of the family is sometimes given in mixed case (Algol 60), and sometimes in all uppercase (ALGOL 68).
ALGOL 60 - with COBOL - were the first languages to seek standardization.