ALGOL 68

language An extensive revision of ALGOL 60 by Adriaan van

Wijngaarden et al. ALGOL 68 was discussed from 1963 by

Working Group 2.1 of IFIP. Its definition was accepted in

December 1968.

ALGOL 68 was complex, and posed difficulties for both

implementors and users. It featured structural equivalence;

automatic type conversion ("coercion") including

dereferencing; flexible arrays; generalised loops

(for-from-by-to-while-do-od), if-then-elif-fi, an integer case

statement with an 'out' clause; skip and goto statements;

blocks; procedures; user-defined operators; procedureparameters; concurrent execution (cobegin/coend);

semaphores; generators "heap" and "loc" for dynamicallocation. It had no abstract data types or separatecompilation.

(1995-05-01)