Re: forth/fifth generation languages?

[slinky.cs.nyu.edu!slinky.cs.nyu.edu!nobody@nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Just for the record, there was a fair amount of "primordial ooze" in 
Algol-60 (see for example Knuth's article on "The Remaining Trouble Spots
in Algol-60") Speaking as one who was involved in the attempted 
standardization of Algol-60-modified ten years later, I can assure you
that there were even at that point a number of serious holes.

I also find the syntax junky in places (e.g. the dangling else rule), and
the semantics of procedure calls remains murky (although it was cleared
up in a60-modified, in particular what does it mean if you don't give 
types to the formal parameters -- no one implemented this of course on
typical machines where it is quite important to distinguish integers and
reals).

Also there were huge functional holes in A60, including lack of I/O,
lack of any string handling capability, lack of any parallelism, and lack
of any kind of data abstraction.

Sure I realize that there were elegant features, but, even though this is
a bit off subject for the Ada newsgroup, I think it is important to
counteract a false impression that somehow A60 was this jewel of perfection.
It failed for many reasons, but one of the reasons was errors of judgment
on the part of the designers -- it was by no means perfect