Comment by lproven

ALGOL-60 was huge, in around 1960. Niklaus Wirth had a detailed proposal for the next version of ALGOL, to be called ALGOL-X.

The ALGOL committee rejected it, choosing a competing and much more complex language headed by Adriaan van Wijngaarden. This became ALGOL-68 -- and killed ALGOL.

Wirth took what was known as ALGOL-W and turned it into Pascal.

FWIW I wrote about this:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituar...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/07/algol_68_comes_to_gcc...

Another offshoot of Algol-60 was CPL, intended to be more general-purpose and capable. But it was big and hard work to get it working.

So Martin Richards designed, a simpler intermediate version, BCPL. (He also built an OS in it, TRIPOS. This formed part of AmigaOS 1.x.)

BCPL was further stripped down to B, and then evolved into C.