Comment by ofalkaed
25 days ago
Personally, I think the whole C tangent was a misstep and would love to see Algo 68 turn into Algo 26 or 27. I sort of like C and C++ and many other languages which came, but they have issues. I think Algo 68 could develop into something better than C++, it has some of the pieces already in place.
Admittedly, every language I really enjoy and get along with is one of those languages that produced little compared to the likes of C (APL, Tcl/Tk, Forth), and as a hobbyist I have no real stake in the game.
I wonder about what you think is wrong with C? C is essentially a much simplified subset of ALGOL68. So what is missing in C?
Proper strings and arrays for starters, instead of being pointers that the programmer is responsible for doing length housekeeping.
Arrays are not pointers and if you do not let them decay to one, they do preserve the length information.
7 replies →
I think what C is missing is everything that people fall back onto clever use of pointers and macros to implement. Not that I think C should have all those things, Zig does a decent job of showing alternatives.
Yeah, but I meant specifically from ALGOL68.
1 reply →
Whilst I think that C has its place, my personal choice of Algol 26 or 27 would be CLU – a highly influential, yet little known and underrated Algol inspired language. CLU is also very approachable and pretty compact.
Consider exploring Ada 2022 as a capable successor to Algol. Its well supported in GCC and scales well from very small to very large projects. Some information is at https://learn.adacore.com/ and https://alire.ada.dev/
Is like to order a complementary question to the sibling one. What are you going to add to (/remove from?) Algol 68 to get Algol 26?
That task would be beyond my skills, as I said, I am just a hobbyist. I think it would be interesting to see what would result from going back to one of those early foundational languages and developing a modern language from it. With a language like Algol we don't have the decades of evolution (baggage) which are a big part of languages like C and C++ and trickle into the languages they inspired even if they are trying to remove that baggage. So, what would we get if we went back to the start and built a modern language off of Algol? What would that look like?
Wouldn't that be some form of Pascal?