ALGOL 60 at 60 - Computerphile

ALGOL 60, a brand new programming language, 60 years ago! Professor Brailsford used to have to teach it - here he shows us some of the code.


This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[profdaveb]

Hi everyone. Thanks to all of you who have sent in so many comments and corrections . If you found this video interesting there's more stuff available via the link to EXTRA BITS in the Info block of this present video. Be clear, that the main reason for Algol60 having a reputation for inefficiency was not so much to do with its provision of run-time recursion but rather with the generality of its call-by-name parameter mechanism . If your procedure arguments were not simply "call by value", there was no way to signal that "call by reference" (aka "call by simple name" ) would be sufficient.
Instead the generalised "call by name" mechanism was the default which required repeated re-evaluation of actual arguments which - more often than not - were unchanging values (or simple references)

[jimdiroffii]

Also after 60 years, they finally let Professor Brailsford back outside.

[robvandeschepop]

Algol 60 was the first computer language I learned at school (HTS Zwolle for the Dutch readers) in 1980.
Every line was written on a separate punch card, done with an IBM punch card machine. This instrument had no keys for the { and }, so that had to be escaped via "(" and ")", and when we made a mistake we had to type the whole line again on a new punch card.
The program (== all punch cards) were preceded and followed by a few other cards and then fed into a punch card reader, which sent the whole program via a PDP11 and a phone line to another town where the mainframe then either compiled it and sent the listing back, or compiled and run it and sent the output back to the line printer at school.
I finished the course with a 10 (an 'A' for the American readers), but then had to repeat the course again because we switched to a ("Prime") minicomputer and to Pascal. And we could use REAL CRT's!

[Eliasdbr]

If Professor Brailsford was my grandfather, I'd be glad to hear his stories all the time :)

[kajyakuzonik]

Prof. Brailsford's stories on computing are just the best!

[sjzara]

I remember discovering Algol 60 as a youngster in the early 70s and I thought it was marvellous! Before, I only had experience of BASIC and FORTRAN. I had no problem understanding the language. I truly loved the successor - Algol 68.

[michaelterrazas]

The Burroughs company made ALGOL their systems programming language, so when we developed devices for Burroughs computers in the 70s, we had to write the device drivers in ALGOL 68.
And the ";" was not allowed after the last statement. It was a statement separator token. The C programming language made it a statement terminator.

[clickrick]

I remember the implementation of ALGOL 60 on the ICL 1900, which required apostrophes around keywords, so
'INTEGER' M, N; 'BEGIN' 'FOR' ...
Ah, happy days!

[Landhund]

The Compiler while going through the Professors programme:
"It's an older code sir, but it checks out."

[FyberOptic]

This is similar to Turbo Pascal, it used begin/end and := for assignments. I really enjoyed that language, it was the first compilable one I used.

[TimsDaBossMC]

considering C as syntactic sugar blew my mind haha guess if C isn't liked now i can only imagine the programs back then. great lesson! glad to have seen it :)

[utkarshnagdev]

Beautiful. His students must be so lucky ♥️

[patrikknoerr]

I bought Algol 68 books years ago for my collection. Great language and one big step for mankind.

[rudiklein]

Great talk again professor! I also very much like the combination of high tech (tablet), low tech (ALGOL60) and the analoge support (stone).

[Gelsamel]

I actually really like that you explicitly notate whether something is passed by value or by reference.

[bigfootisjustreallyshy]

I'm a pretty bitter, jaded internet user nowadays. Everything from twitter to youtube seems to nothing but insanity and rage bait. But Professor Brailsford's Computerphile videos always put a smile on my face.

[otakuribo]

"God, I used to _love_ teaching this to raw beginners."
But Professor Brailsford, that's exactly what you're doing

[esra_erimez]

A gift given to humanity by John Backus along with BNF notation. This was a huge advancement over FORTRAN and COBOL despite some of these short comings.

[hoagy_ytfc]

First "proper" language I used. I started on a Research Machines 380Z in 1978, using Basic then Fortran. Once we got the Algol 60 compiler, it was suddenly something that I thought felt "modern".

My first "favourite" language was Algol 68 which I came across a couple of years later on a Multics mainframe. That was a fairly different language, but was SO powerful for the time.

[taguetrash]

Honestly, that's a surprisingly readable language considering the state of other "dated" languages like COBOL. I wanna try it now!