From: "John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@...>
Date: 2006-10-11T13:40:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Rails

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> When you come down to it, about the only things in Algol that weren't in
> Fortran were recursion and the block structure variable name scoping.

And automatic storage and adjustable arrays and the ternary operator 
(expressed with "if", "then", and "else" keywords), and structured 
programming and boolean variables.

And by-name passing, but the less said of that, the better.

About 90% of languages, including modern dialects of FORTRAN and COBOL 
take a large part of their DNA from ALGOL. Only SmallTalk, the LISP 
family, the APL family, and RPG have no significant ALGOL ancestry.

-- 
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
   -- Charles Williams.  "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"