Algol 68 implementations and dialects — Software Preservation Group (original) (raw)

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Conferences, theses, and reports on implementing Algol 68

Algol68C (University of Cambridge)

"The ALGOL68C compiler was developed in Cambridge by a team led, until January 1975, by S. R. Bourne. Since then it has been maintained and further developed by C. J. Cheney for the University of Cambridge Computing Service. Throughout the development of the compiler much advice and much work has been given by M. J. T. Guy, I. Walker, and myself. Much of the work has been funded by the Science Research Council, and the maintenance is now supported by the Computer Board. Help has been given by our various users and by I. Wand of York University. Much of our terminology, and some of the ideas, are based on those of P. Branquart." [Birrell SIGPLAN Notices 1977]

Algol 68 Genie (a68g)

"Algol 68 Genie (a68g) is a well-featured Algol 68 interpreter. It can be used for executing Algol 68 programs or scripts. Algol 68 is a rather lean orthogonal general-purpose language that is a beautiful means for denoting algorithms." [van der Veer]

Algol 68H (University of Alberta; Mathematisch Centrum)

"About 40 years ago I had been writing an Algol 68 compiler. I started it at the University of Alberta. It wasn't finished after I spent about two and a half years on it, and I decided that was enough. I has essentially a complete, functioning front end, and a fairly incomplete draft of a code generator. The whole thing was written in Algol W.

When I moved to the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam it didn't take long for one of its directors to get wind of the incomplete compiler. He had access to an IBM 370, which was compatible with the machine I had first implemented on, so he prevailed on me to resume work on it. I agreed. I now look at that as a mistake. The facilities available weren't as good as they had been in Alberta (TSO instead of MTS, which meant slow turnaround whether I took the train to Delft every day of stayed in Amsterdam and used a 300 bps phone line.) Over the next few years I got the compiler to the point that it correctly handled about half the test set, but it really wasn't ready for serious use.

Then funding ran out, I left the Netherlands, and after that I had essentially no opportunity to continue work on it. Perhaps I could have reimplemented Algol W and then rewrote the code generator for another machine, but in new jobs I had other responsibilities." [Boom 2010]

ALGOL 68-R (Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern)

"Being implementations of the original language, neither of these compilers [Munich nor MBLE] ever came into use outside their home bases. The Malvern ALGOL 68R compiler, on the other hand, restricted the language so as to permit l-pass compilation and also made numerous small language changes, for convenience of implementation. Some, but not all, of these changes were subsequently blessed by inclusion within [ALGOL 68 revised report]. Thus [ALGOL 68 report], [ALGOL 68 revised report], and ALGOL 68R could be regarded as three vertices of an equilateral triangle. It was available from 1970 onwards on ICL 1900 series machines, and became the most widely used implementation, especially in Great Britain." [Lindsey 1996]

A section covers Developing the World's First ALGOL 68 Compiler.

ALGOL 68RS (Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, Malvern)

"Next, Malvern produced their second attempt, ALGOL 68RS, for their own in-house machines and available from 1977. This was much closer to [RR] than their first product, it was written to be machine independent, and it has been ported to the ICL 2900 series, to MULTICS and to VMS Vaxen. It is still the best starting point, should anyone wish a new (almost) full implementation." [Lindsey 1996]

ALGOL 68S (University of Liverpool; Carnegie-Mellon University; University of Manchester)

"Although a Subcommittee on Sublanguages had been formed at Manchester, it never produced anything concrete, and it was an independent effort by Peter Hibbard, implementing on a minicomputer with only 16K words at Liverpool, which eventually bore fruit. Hibbard's sublanguage, first introduced to the WG at Vienna, was intended for mainly numerical applications, and the features omitted from it were intended to simplify compilation. It was discussed by the WG and the Support Subcommittee on several occasions, and finally formulated as an addendum to the Report and released for publication as an IFIP Document at Munich. However, the final polishing lasted for some time until it eventually appeared as [Hibbard 1977]. ...
...
Hibbard's Liverpool implementation, around which his sublanguage ... was designed, was rewritten in BLISS for a PDP-11 when he moved to Carnegie Mellon, and was rewritten again by myself in Pascal and now runs on various machines. On the way, it acquired heap-generators (not in the original sublanguage), giving it nearly the functionality of the full language." [Lindsey 1996]

ACK was originally developed by a project led by A. S. Tanenbaum at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

“A68S is part of the ACK and an old version can be found on sourceforge: http://tack.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tack/Ack/lang/a68s/.” [Neville Dempsey, personal communication, May 2010]

ALGOL-N (Kyoto University)

"The Japanese were also active in language design, and produced their own "ALGOL N" [AB30.3.2], a simplified form of ALGOL 68 with a simplified method of description." [Lindsey 1988]

Berlin ALGOL 68 (Technische Universität Berlin)

BETA (Novosibirsk)

CDC ALGOL 68

"The most successful commercial implementation was by CDC Netherlands, first delivered in 1977 in response to a threat from several Dutch universities to buy only machines with ALGOL 68 available. It was an excellent compiler, but the parent company in the USA never showed any interest in it." [Lindsey 1996]

FLACC (Full Language Algol68 Checkout Compiler)

"Chris Thomson and Colin Broughton established the Chion Corporation,ß which developed and marketed FLACC (Full Language Algol 68 Checkout Compiler). This compiler and run-time system conformed exactly to the Revised Report, ran on IBM 370 and compatible mainframes, and included debugging features derived from WATFIV. It was released in 1977.

Chris was a student of Barry J. Mailloux, who studied at Amsterdam's Mathematisch Centrum from 1966 under Adriaan van Wijngaarden. His work on the Algol 68 language established the University of Alberta as a center for Algol 68-related activity." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLACC]

"You know, we only ever got 22 copies installed, and less than 5 of those in North America. Even though it ran on 370's under MVS, CMS and MTS, and was cheap and reliable. Talk about a marketing disaster. " [Chris Thomson, comp.lang.misc, November 27, 1988]

"The final commercial-strength product, called FLACC and first shipped in 1978, was a checkout compiler for IBM machines. This was produced by two of Mailloux's ex-students who set up their own company. Again, this was an excellent product (not fast, being a checkout system), but it did not spread far because they completely misjudged the price the market would pay." [Lindsey 1996]

GE-635 ALGOL 68 (Dartmouth)

Interactive Algol68 (Algol Applications Limited; Orthogonal Software; Oxford and Cambridge Compilers Limited)

Kiev Algol 68

ALGOL 68/19 (Koninklijke Militaire School)

ALGOL 68/19 was a subset of ALGOL 68. Version 1 (November 1973) ran on IBM 360/30 under DOS. It had the ALGOL 68 modes except unions and structures; there was no mode definition mechanism or operator definition mechanism. All procedures were void (no functions). It had a non-standard set of physical i/o routines. There were no formats, but there were conversion routines to/from strings. There was dynamic storage but no heap. There was separate compilation.

Version 2 (March 1974) added non-void functions, a set of mathematical functions in the standard prelude, formatted i/o on the standard devices, a fast link-and-go compiler (without separate compilation), and more.

Version 3 (November 1975), by Guy Louis, ran on an IBM 370/158 under VM/CMS. It added checking of modes of separately-compiled procedures, and more.

[From Gennard and Louis 1976]

Leningrad State University Algol 68 for Riad (IBM System/360 clone)

Project led by G. S. Tseytin of Leningrad State University.

Mary (Norwegian Institute of Technology; Penobscot Research Center)

"Mary was a programming language designed and implemented by RUNIT at Trondheim, Norway in the 1970s. It borrowed many features from ALGOL 68 but was designed for machine-oriented programming. ... The original Mary compiler was written in NU ALGOL, ran on the Univac-1100 series and was used to bootstrap a native compiler for ND-100/SINTRAN-III." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(programming_language)]

"Mary was an Algol68 derivative for embedded systems ... There was a Mary/1 done at NTH, targeting the NDE and KV minicomputers, which were almost identical at the ISE level. We wrote an OS for those machines in Mary, which wound up being used in telephone switches made by NDE. ... Mary2 was done at Penobscot Research Center in Maine, running on Data General and Harris machines [and written in Mary/2]." [Ivan Godard (formerly known as Mark Rain), personal communication to Paul McJones, May 2010]

MBLE (Research Laboratory of Manufacture Belge de Lampes et de Materiel Electronique S.A., Brussels) ALGOL 68

"Branquart's compiler [on an Electrologica X8] was a piece of research into compiler methodology rather than a serious production tool, but it did establish many features necessary to all compilers, particularly the storage of values and the layout of the stack, all documented in a series of MBLE Reports that were finally collated into [Branquart 1976]. The project consumed 20 man-years of effort, spread over the years 1967 to 1973." [Lindsey 1996]

"[By 1974], the X8 had already disappeared from the lab, but a microprogrammed simulator was available (on a prototype Philips machine that was never marketed)." [Georges M. Louis, email to Paul McJones, 25 April 2017]

Mini ALGOL 68 (Mathematisch Centrum)

Moscow Algol 68 (for DEC architecture)

Moscow Algol 68 (for Elbrus architecture)

Munich (Technische Hochschule Munich) ALGOL 68

"The implementations by Goos at Munich on a Telefunken TR4, and by Branquart at MBLE on an Electrologica-X8, were well under way by the appearance of [ALGOL 68 report]." [Lindsey 1996]

Oklahoma State University Algol 68

Written in ANSI Fortran 1966, and run on an IBM 370/158 and an IBM 1130.

Algol 68 for University of Paris-XI (Orsay)

Written in Fortran V for Univac 1100 series.

Project SAR (Système Algol Rennes) (Université de Rennes)

Rutgers (DIMACS) Algol-68

"History: the Interpreter originates from the one made by L. Ammeraal in the Mathematical Center, Amsterdam, in 1973. It was written in Algol-60. The interpreter was debugged and implemented on an ICL 1903A machine by L. Csirmaz in 1974. The present competely revised version was written in C. The lexical analyzer was written by Sam Rebelsky, the other parts by L. Csirmaz, both at the University of Chicago. Later it has been ported to DOS and Linux by L. Csirmaz." [Csirmaz, 1987]

S3 for ICL 2900

"S3 is a structured, imperative high-level computer programming language. It was developed by the UK company International Computers Limited (ICL) for its 2900 Series mainframes. It is a system programming language based on ALGOL 68 but with data types and operators aligned to those offered by the 2900 Series. It was the implementation language of the operating system VME." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_(programming_language)]

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