From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-10-11T13:53:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Rails

John W. Kennedy wrote:
> 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.

Well, despite the fact that Chuck Moore cut his programming teeth on
Burroughs Algol before creating Forth, I think Forth has little Algol in
it other than the fact that it is stack-based.But C is a direct
descendant of Algol -- Algol --> CPL --> BCPL --> B --> C. That may not
be 90% of languages but it's got to be close to 90 percent of the code
that's executed every day. :)