Explain term Algol

The 1950s and early 1960s saw the emergence of two high-

level computer languages into widespread use. The first was 

designed to be an efficient language for performing scien-

tific calculations .The second was designed 

for business applications, with an emphasis on data pro-

cessing .However many programs continued to 

be coded in low-level languages designed 

to take advantages of the hardware features of particular 

machines.

In order to be able to easily express and share meth-

ods of calculation .leading programmers

began to seek a “universal” programming language that 

was not designed for a particular application or hardware 

platform. By 1957, the German GAMM (Gesellschaft für 

angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik) and the American 

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) had joined 

forces to develop the specifications for such a language. The 

result became known as the Zurich Report or Algol-58, and 

it was refined into the first widespread implementation of 

the language, Algol-60.

Language Features

Algol is a block-structured, procedural language. Each vari-

able is declared to belong to one of a small number of kinds 

of data including integer, real number,

or a series of values of either type . While the 

number of types is limited and there is no facility for defin-

ing new types, the compiler’s type checking (making sure a 

data item matches the variable’s declared type) introduced a 

level of security not found in most earlier languages.

An Algol program can contain a number of separate 

procedures or incorporate externally defined procedures 

and the variables with the same 

name in different procedure blocks do not interfere with 

one another. A procedure can call itself 

Standard control structures  were provided.

The following simple Algol program stores the numbers 

from 1 to 10 in an array while adding them up, then prints 

the total:

begin

integer array ints[1:10];

integer counter, total;

total := 0;

for counter :=1 step 1 until counter > 10

do

begin

ints [counter] := counter;

total := total + ints[counter];

end;

printstring “The total is:”;

printint (total);

end

Algol’s Legacy

The revision that became known as Algol-68 expanded 

the variety of data types (including the addition of bool-

ean, or true/false values) and added user-defined types 

and “structs” (records containing fields of different types 

of data). Pointers (references to values) were also imple-

mented, and flexibility was added to the parameters that 

could be passed to and from procedures.

Although Algol was used as a production language in 

some computer centers (particularly in Europe), its rela-

tive complexity and unfamiliarity impeded its acceptance, 

as did the widespread corporate backing for the rival lan-

guages FORTRAN and especially COBOL. Algol achieved 

its greatest success in two respects: for a time it became 

the language of choice for describing new algorithms for 

computer scientists, and its structural features would be 

adopted in the new procedural languages that emerged in 

the 1970s


See also::

Explain-term-algorithm

Share on Google Plus

About Tech-technewes.blogspot.com

This is a short description in the author block about the author. You edit it by entering text in the "Biographical Info" field in the user admin panel.