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Re: ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide

From Carlos H <pragus@centrum.cz>
Newsgroups comp.lang.misc
Subject Re: ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide
Date 2025-10-25 19:40 +0200
Organization A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID <10dj234$3gi83$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References <10dbv8k$12h5c$1@dont-email.me> <10dc7tl$17987$1@dont-email.me> <10ddrva$1g88i$1@dont-email.me> <10dgl9i$116n0$1@artemis.inf.ed.ac.uk>

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On 24/10/2025 21:50, Richard Tobin wrote:
> The Wikipedia page for Algol 68 references an article in this very
> newsgroup by Dennis Ritchie entitled "C and Algol 68", but it appears
> to have gone from the Internet Archive, no doubt thanks to Google.
> Does anyone have a copy?

It's in the file comp.lang.misc.mbox.zip that you can download from 
https://archive.org/download/usenet-comp

--8<---
From: dmr@alice.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: C and Algol 68
Message-ID: <7997@alice.UUCP>
Date: 18 Jun 88 09:23:34 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 13

Practically everything ok@quintus cites as proving that C does not
descend from Algol 68 is true, yet there was influence, much of
it so subtle that it is hard to recover even when I think hard.
In particular, the union type (a late addition to C) does owe to A68,
not in any details, but in the idea of having such a type at all.
More deeply, the type structure in general and even, in some strange
way, the declaration syntax (the type-constructor part) was inspired by A68.
And yes, of course, "long".

Mostly, of course, C is Thompsonized BCPL (that is, B) with types.
You don't have to look too hard to find PL/1 and Fortran, either.

	Dennis Ritchie
--8<--

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Thread

ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-23 01:09 +0000
  Re: ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-23 05:37 +0200
    Re: ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-10-23 19:25 +0100
      Re: Re: ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) - 2025-10-24 19:50 +0000
        Re: ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-25 02:50 +0200
        Re: ALGOL-68-R User’s Guide Carlos H <pragus@centrum.cz> - 2025-10-25 19:40 +0200

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