ALGOL 60

ALGOL 60 is a member of the ALGOL

ALGOL

ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...

family of computer programming languages. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including BCPL

BCPL

BCPL is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.- Design :...

, B, Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

, Simula

Simula

Simula is a name for two programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard...

, C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, and many others. ALGOL 58

ALGOL 58

ALGOL 58, originally known as IAL, is one of the family of ALGOL computer programming languages. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60...

introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them. ALGOL 60 was the first language implementing nested function

Nested function

In computer programming, a nested function is a function which is lexically encapsulated within another function. It can only be called by the enclosing function or by functions directly or indirectly nested within the same enclosing function. In other words, the scope of the nested function is...

definitions with lexical scope.

Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.-Biography:Wirth...

based his own ALGOL W

ALGOL W

ALGOL W is a programming language. It was based on a proposal for ALGOL X by Niklaus Wirth and C. A. R. Hoare as a successor to ALGOL 60 in IFIP Working Group 2.1. When the committee decided that the proposal was not a sufficient advance over ALGOL 60, the proposal was published as A contribution...

on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68

ALGOL 68

ALGOL 68 isan imperative computerprogramming language that was conceived as a successor to theALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a...

committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published.

ALGOL 68

ALGOL 68

ALGOL 68 isan imperative computerprogramming language that was conceived as a successor to theALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a...

is substantially different from Algol 60 but was not well received so that in general "Algol" means dialects of Algol 60. The name ALGOL

ALGOL

of the family is sometimes given in mixed case (Algol 60), and sometimes in all uppercase (ALGOL 68).

Standardization

ALGOL 60 - with COBOL

COBOL

COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....

- were the first languages to seek standardization.

ISO 1538:1984, Programming language Algol 60 (now withdrawn)
ISO TR 1672:1977, Algol 60 Hardware Representation (now withdrawn)

History

ALGOL 60 was used mostly by research computer scientists in the United States and in Europe. Its use in commercial applications was hindered by the absence of standard input/output facilities in its description and the lack of interest in the language by large computer vendors. ALGOL 60 did however become the standard for the publication of algorithms and had a profound effect on future language development.

John Backus

John Backus

John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form , the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax.He also did research in...

developed the Backus normal form

Backus–Naur form

In computer science, BNF is a notation technique for context-free grammars, often used to describe the syntax of languages used in computing, such as computer programming languages, document formats, instruction sets and communication protocols.It is applied wherever exact descriptions of...

method of describing programming languages specifically for ALGOL 58. It was revised and expanded by Peter Naur

Peter Naur

Peter Naur is a Danish pioneer in computer science and Turing award winner. His last name is the N in the BNF notation , used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages...

for ALGOL 60, and at Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...

's suggestion renamed Backus–Naur Form

Backus–Naur form

.

Peter Naur: "As editor of the ALGOL Bulletin I was drawn into the international discussions of the language and was selected to be member of the European language design group in November 1959. In this capacity I was the editor of the ALGOL 60 report, produced as the result of the ALGOL 60 meeting in Paris in January 1960."

The following people attended the meeting in Paris (from January 11 to 16):

Friedrich L. Bauer
Friedrich L. Bauer
Friedrich Ludwig Bauer is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at Technical University of Munich.-Life:...

, Peter Naur
Peter Naur
Peter Naur is a Danish pioneer in computer science and Turing award winner. His last name is the N in the BNF notation , used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages...

, Heinz Rutishauser
Heinz Rutishauser
Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science.- Life :...

, Klaus Samelson
Klaus Samelson
Klaus Samelson was a German mathematician, physicist, and computer pioneer in the area of programming language translation and push-pop stack algorithms for sequential formula translation on computers.- Early life :...

, Bernard Vauquois, Adriaan van Wijngaarden
Adriaan van Wijngaarden
Adriaan van Wijngaarden was an important mathematician and computer scientist who is considered by many to have been the founding father of informatica in the Netherlands...

, and Michael Woodger (from Europe)
John W. Backus
John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form , the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax.He also did research in...

, Julien Green, Charles Katz, John McCarthy
John McCarthy (computer scientist)
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...

, Alan J. Perlis
Alan Perlis
Alan Jay Perlis was an American computer scientist known for his pioneering work in programming languages and the first recipient of the Turing Award.-Biography:...

, and Joseph Henry Wegstein (from the USA).

Alan Perlis gave a vivid description of the meeting: "The meetings were exhausting, interminable, and exhilarating. One became aggravated when one's good ideas were discarded along with the bad ones of others. Nevertheless, diligence persisted during the entire period. The chemistry of the 13 was excellent."

Both John Backus and Peter Naur served on the committee which created ALGOL 60 as did Wally Feurzeig

Wally Feurzeig

Wally Feurzeig is an inventor of the LOGO programming language, and a well-known researcher in Artificial Intelligence.During the early 1960s, BBN had become a major center of computer science research and innovative applications...

, who later created Logo

Logo (programming language)

Logo is a multi-paradigm computer programming language used in education. It is an adaptation and dialect of the Lisp language; some have called it Lisp without the parentheses. It was originally conceived and written as functional programming language, and drove a mechanical turtle as an output...

.

ALGOL 60 inspired many languages that followed it. C. A. R. Hoare

C. A. R. Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare , commonly known as Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist best known for the development of Quicksort, one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms...

remarked: "Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors." The Scheme programming language, a variant of Lisp that adopted the block structure and lexical scope of ALGOL, also adopted the wording "Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme" for its standards documents in homage to ALGOL.

ALGOL 60 implementations timeline

To date there have been at least 70 augmentations, extensions, derivations and sublanguages of Algol 60.

Name	Year	Author	State	Description	Target CPU
X1 ALGOL 60	August 1960	Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jaap A. Zonneveld	Netherlands	First implementation of ALGOL 60	Electrologica X1 Electrologica X1 The Electrologica X1 was a digital computer designed and manufactured in the Netherlands from 1958 to 1965. About thirty were produced and sold in the Netherlands and abroad....
Elliott ALGOL Elliott ALGOL Elliott ALGOL was an ALGOL 60 compiler for the Eliott 803 computer. It differed slightly from the reference version of Algol, particularly in the supported character set. First released in February 1962, it is believed to be the first implementation of an ALGOL 60 compiler in a commercial context...	1960s	C. A. R. Hoare C. A. R. Hoare Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare , commonly known as Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist best known for the development of Quicksort, one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms...	UK	Subject of the famous Turing Turing Award The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the... lecture	Elliott 803 Elliott 803 The Elliott 803 was a small, medium speed digital computer manufactured by the British company Elliott Brothers in the 1960s. About 250 were built and most British universities and colleges bought one.-History:... & the Elliott 503
Burroughs Algol (Several variants)	1961	Burroughs Corporation (with participation by Hoare, Dijkstra, and others)	USA	Basis of the Burroughs (and now Unisys Unisys Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:... MCP based) computers	Burroughs large systems and their midrange as well.
Case ALGOL	1961		USA	Simula Simula Simula is a name for two programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard... was originally contracted as a simulation extension of the Case ALGOL	UNIVAC 1107 UNIVAC 1107 The UNIVAC 1107 was the first member of Sperry Rand's UNIVAC 1100 series of computers, introduced in October 1962. It was also known as the Thin Film Computer because of its use of thin film memory for its register storage...
GOGOL	1961	Bill McKeeman	USA	For ODIN Odin Odin is a major god in Norse mythology and the ruler of Asgard. Homologous with the Anglo-Saxon "Wōden" and the Old High German "Wotan", the name is descended from Proto-Germanic "Wodanaz" or "Wōđanaz".... time-sharing system	PDP-1 PDP-1 The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...
RegneCentralen ALGOL	1961	Peter Naur Peter Naur Peter Naur is a Danish pioneer in computer science and Turing award winner. His last name is the N in the BNF notation , used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages... , Jørn Jensen Jørn Jensen Jørn Jensen, one of the earliest Danish programmers. Examined as a mechanical engineer and had worked with electromechanical construction. In 1958 employed at the Danish Regnecentralen, and very soon exhibited an extraordinary programming skill...	Denmark	Implementation of full Algol 60	DASK at Regnecentralen
Dartmouth ALGOL 30 Dartmouth ALGOL 30 Dartmouth ALGOL 30 was an implementation, firstly of ALGOL 58, then of ALGOL 60 for the LGP-30 at Dartmouth College, hence the name.Since the limited size of the LGP-30 precluded a full implementation of ALGOL 60, certain of its features were omitted; but the implementors did include parameters...	1962	Thomas Eugene Kurtz Thomas Eugene Kurtz Thomas Eugene Kurtz is an American computer scientist who co-developed the BASIC programming language during 1963 to 1964, together with John G. Kemeny.... et al.	USA		LGP-30 LGP-30 The LGP-30, standing for Librascope General Purpose and then Librascope General Precision, was an early off-the-shelf computer. It was manufactured by the Librascope company of Glendale, California , and sold and serviced by the Royal Precision Electronic Computer Company, a joint venture with the...
USS 90 Algol	1962	L. Petrone	Italy
Algol Translator	1962	G. van der Mey and W.L. van der Poel Willem van der Poel Willem Louis van der Poel is a pioneering Dutch computer scientist, who is known for designing the ZEBRA computer. In 1950 he obtained an engineering degree in applied science at Delft University of Technology. In 1956 he obtained his PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam...	Netherlands	Staatsbedrijf der Posterijen, Telegrafie en Telefonie	ZEBRA ZEBRA (computer) The ZEBRA was one of the first computers to be designed in the Netherlands, and one of the first Dutch computers to be commercially available...
Kidsgrove Algol	1963	F. G. Duncan	UK		English Electric Company English Electric English Electric was a British industrial manufacturer. Founded in 1918, it initially specialised in industrial electric motors and transformers... KDF9 English Electric KDF9 KDF9 was an early British computer designed and built by English Electric, later English Electric Leo Marconi, EELM, later still incorporated into ICL. It first came into service in 1964 and was still in use in 1980 in at least one installation...
VALGOL	1963	Val Schorre	USA	A test of the META II META II META II is a compiler writing language first released in 1962 by D. V. Schorre. It consists of syntax equations resembling Backus normal form and into which instructions to output assembly language commands are inserted. Compilers have been written in this language for VALGOL I and VALGOL II... compiler compiler
FP6000 Algol	1963	Roger Moore Roger Moore (computer scientist) Roger D. Moore was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery...	Canada	written for Saskatchewan Power Corp SaskPower Since 1929, SaskPower has been the principal supplier of electricity in Saskatchewan, Canada. Today, it serves more than 473,000 customers and manages $5.3 billion in assets...	FP6000 Ferranti-Packard 6000 The FP-6000 was a second generation mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so...
Whetstone Whetstone (benchmark) The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers. It was first written in Algol 60 in 1972 at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom and derived from statistics on program behaviour gathered on the KDF9 computer, using a modified version...	1964	Brian Randell Brian Randell Brian Randell is a British computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, U.K. He specializes in research in software fault tolerance and dependability, and is a noted authority on the early prior to 1950 history of computers.- Biography... and L J Russell	UK	Atomic Power Division of English Electric Company. Precursor to Ferranti Pegasus, National Physical Laboratories ACE and English Electric DEUCE English Electric DEUCE The DEUCE was one of the earliest British commercially available computers, built by English Electric from 1955.It was the production version of the Pilot ACE, itself a cut down version of Alan Turing's ACE.... implementations.	English Electric Company KDF9 English Electric KDF9 KDF9 was an early British computer designed and built by English Electric, later English Electric Leo Marconi, EELM, later still incorporated into ICL. It first came into service in 1964 and was still in use in 1980 in at least one installation...
NU ALGOL	1965		Norway		UNIVAC UNIVAC UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
ALGEK	1965		USSR Soviet Union The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....	Minsk-22 Minsk family of computers Minsk family of mainframe computers was developed and produced in the Byelorussian SSR from 1959 to 1975. Its further progress was stopped by a political decision of switching to IBM System/360 clone family known as ES EVM during the brief period of détente....	АЛГЭК, based on ALGOL-60 and COBOL COBOL COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.... support, for economical tasks
MALGOL	1966	publ. A. Viil, M Kotli & M. Rakhendi,	Estonian SSR Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic , often abbreviated as Estonian SSR or ESSR, was a republic of the Soviet Union, administered by and subordinated to the Government of the Soviet Union...	Minsk-22 Minsk family of computers Minsk family of mainframe computers was developed and produced in the Byelorussian SSR from 1959 to 1975. Its further progress was stopped by a political decision of switching to IBM System/360 clone family known as ES EVM during the brief period of détente....
ALGAMS	1967	GAMS group (ГАМС, группа автоматизации программирования для машин среднего класса), cooperation of Comecon Academies of Science	Comecon Comecon The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance , 1949–1991, was an economic organisation under hegemony of Soviet Union comprising the countries of the Eastern Bloc along with a number of communist states elsewhere in the world...	Minsk-22 Minsk family of computers Minsk family of mainframe computers was developed and produced in the Byelorussian SSR from 1959 to 1975. Its further progress was stopped by a political decision of switching to IBM System/360 clone family known as ES EVM during the brief period of détente.... , later ES EVM ES EVM ES EVM was a series of clones of IBM's System/360 and System/370 mainframes, released in the Comecon countries under the initiative of the Soviet Union since the 1960s. Production continued until 1998... , BESM BESM BESM is the name of a series of Soviet mainframe computers built in 1950-1960s. The name is an acronym for "Bolshaya Elektronno-Schetnaya Mashina" , literally "Large Electronically Computing Machine". The series began as a successor to MESM...
ALGOL/ZAM	1967		Poland		Polish ZAM computer
Chinese Algol	1972		China	Chinese characters, expressed via the Symbol system
DG/L DG/L DG/L was a programming language developed by Data General Corp for the Nova, Eclipse and Eclipse/MV families of minicomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s.There were actually two separate versions:...	1972		USA		DG Eclipse Data General Eclipse The Data General Eclipse line of computers by Data General were 16-bit minicomputers released in early 1974 and sold until 1988. The Eclipse was based on many of the same concepts as the Data General Nova, but included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office... family of Computers

The Burroughs dialects included special Bootstrapping dialects such as ESPOL

ESPOL

ESPOL was a superset of ALGOL 60 that provided capabilities of what would later be known as Mohols, machine oriented high order languages, such as interrupting a processor on a multiprocessor system...

and NEWP

NEWP

NEWP is a high-level programming language used on the Unisys MCP systems. The language is used to write the operating system and other system utilities, although it can also be used to write user software as well. Several constructs separate it from extended ALGOL on which it is based...

Properties

ALGOL 60 as officially defined had no I/O facilities; implementations defined their own in ways that were rarely compatible with each other. In contrast, ALGOL 68 offered an extensive library of transput (ALGOL 68 parlance for Input/Output) facilities.

ALGOL 60 allowed for two evaluation strategies

Evaluation strategy

In computer science, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions in a programming language. Emphasis is typically placed on functions or operators: an evaluation strategy defines when and in what order the arguments to a function are evaluated, when they are substituted...

for parameter

Parameter (computer science)

In computer programming, a parameter is a special kind of variable, used in a subroutine to refer to one of the pieces of data provided as input to the subroutine. These pieces of data are called arguments...

passing: the common call-by-value, and call-by-name. Call-by-name had certain limitations in contrast to call-by-reference, making it an undesirable feature in imperative language design. For example, it is impossible in ALGOL 60 to develop a procedure that will swap the values of two parameters if the actual parameters that are passed in are an integer variable and an array that is indexed by that same integer variable.
However, call-by-name is still beloved of ALGOL implementors for the interesting "thunk

Thunk (functional programming)

In computer science, a thunk is a parameterless closure created to prevent the evaluation of an expression until forced at a later time. In lazy languages thunks are created and forced implicitly...

s" that are used to implement it. Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth

devised the "man or boy test

Man or boy test

The man or boy test was proposed by computer scientist Donald Knuth as a means of evaluating implementations of the ALGOL 60 programming language...

" to separate compilers that correctly implemented "recursion and non-local references." This test contains an example of call-by-name.

ALGOL 60 Reserved words and restricted identifiers

There are 35 such reserved words in the standard Burroughs large systems sub-language:

ALPHA
ARRAY
BEGIN
BOOLEAN
COMMENT
CONTINUE
DIRECT

DO

DOUBLE

ELSE

END

EVENT

FALSE

FILE

FOR

FORMAT

GO

IF

INTEGER

LABEL

LIST

LONG

OWN

POINTER

PROCEDURE

REAL

STEP

SWITCH

TASK

THEN

TRUE

UNTIL

VALUE

WHILE

ZIP

There are 71 such restricted identifiers in the standard Burroughs large systems sub-language:

ACCEPT
AND
ATTACH
BY
CALL
CASE
CAUSE
CLOSE
DEALLOCATE
DEFINE
DETACH
DISABLE
DISPLAY
DIV
DUMP

ENABLE

EQL

EQV

EXCHANGE

EXTERNAL

FILL

FORWARD

GEQ

GTR

IMP

IN

INTERRUPT

IS

LB

LEQ

LIBERATE

LINE

LOCK

LSS

MERGE

MOD

MONITOR

MUX

NEQ

NO

NOT

ON

OPEN

OR

OUT

PICTURE

PROCESS

PROCURE

PROGRAMDUMP

RB

READ

RELEASE

REPLACE

RESET

RESIZE

REWIND

RUN

SCAN

SEEK

SET

SKIP

SORT

SPACE

SWAP

THRU

TIMES

TO

WAIT

WHEN

WITH

WRITE

and also the names of all the intrinsic functions.

Standard Operators

Priority		Operator
first arithmetic	first	↑ (power)
	second	×, / (real), ÷ (integer)
	third	+, -
second		<, ≤, =, ≥, >, ≠
third		¬ (not)
fourth		∧ (or)
fifth		∨ (and)
sixth		⊃ (implication)
seventh		≡ (equivalence)

procedure Absmax(a) Size:(n, m) Result:(y) Subscripts:(i, k);
value n, m; array a; integer n, m, i, k; real y;
comment The absolute greatest element of the matrix a, of size n by m
is transferred to y, and the subscripts of this element to i and k;
begin integer p, q;
y := 0; i := k := 1;
for p:=1 step 1 until n do
for q:=1 step 1 until m do
if abs(a[p, q]) > y then
begin y := abs(a[p, q]);
i := p; k := q
end
end Absmax

Implementations differ in how the text in bold must be written. The word 'INTEGER', including the quotation marks, must be used in some implementations in place of integer, above, thereby designating it as a special keyword.

Following is an example of how to produce a table using Elliott 803 ALGOL:

FLOATING POINT ALGOL TEST'
BEGIN REAL A,B,C,D'

READ D'

FOR A:= 0.0 STEP D UNTIL 6.3 DO
BEGIN
PRINT PUNCH(3),££L??'
B := SIN(A)'
C := COS(A)'
PRINT PUNCH(3),SAMELINE,ALIGNED(1,6),A,B,C'
END'
END'

PUNCH(3) sends output to the teleprinter rather than the tape punch.

SAMELINE suppresses the carriage return + line feed normally printed between arguments.

ALIGNED(1,6) controls the format of the output with 1 digit before and 6 after the decimal point

ALGOL 60 family

Since ALGOL 60 had no I/O facilities, there is no portable hello world program

Hello world program

A "Hello world" program is a computer program that outputs "Hello world" on a display device. Because it is typically one of the simplest programs possible in most programming languages, it is by tradition often used to illustrate to beginners the most basic syntax of a programming language, or to...

in ALGOL. The following program could (and still will) compile and run on an ALGOL implementation for a Unisys A-Series mainframe, and is a straightforward simplification of code taken from The Language Guide at the University of Michigan

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

-Dearborn Computer and Information
Science Department Hello world! ALGOL Example Program page.

BEGIN
FILE F(KIND=REMOTE);
EBCDIC ARRAY E[0:11];
REPLACE E BY "HELLO WORLD!";
WRITE(F, *, E);
END.

A simpler program using an inline format:

BEGIN
FILE F(KIND=REMOTE);
WRITE(F, <"HELLO WORLD!">);
END.

An even simpler program using the Display statement:

BEGIN DISPLAY("HELLO WORLD!") END.

An alternative example, using Elliott Algol I/O is as follows. Elliott Algol used different characters for "open-string-quote" and "close-string-quote", represented here by ‘ and ’.

program HiFolks;
begin
print ‘Hello world’
end;

Here's a version for the Elliott 803 Algol (A104) The standard Elliott 803 used 5 hole paper tape and thus only had upper case. The code lacked any quote characters so £ (UK Pound Sign) was used for open quote and ? (Question Mark) for close quote. Special sequences were placed in double quotes (e.g. ££L?? produced a new line on the teleprinter).

HIFOLKS'
BEGIN
PRINT £HELLO WORLD£L??'
END'

The ICT 1900 series

ICT 1900 series

ICT 1900 was the name given to a series of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators and later International Computers Limited during the 1960s and '70s...

Algol I/O version allowed input from paper tape or punched card. Paper tape 'full' mode allowed lower case. Output was to a line printer.
'PROGRAM' (HELLO)
'BEGIN'
'COMMENT' OPEN QUOTE IS '(', CLOSE IS ')', PRINTABLE SPACE HAS TO
BE WRITTEN AS % BECAUSE SPACES ARE IGNORED;
WRITE TEXT('('HELLO%WORLD')');
'END'
'FINISH'

External links

Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60 by Peter Naur, et al. ALGOL definition
A BNF syntax summary of ALGOL 60
"The Emperor's Old Clothes" - Hoare's 1980 ACM Turing Award speech, which discusses ALGOL history and his involvement
MARST, a free Algol-to-C translator
AN IMPLEMENTATION OF ALGOL 60 FOR THE FP6000 Discussion of some implementation issues.
"The European Side of the Last Phase of the Development of ALGOL 60" by Peter Naur
Edinburgh University wrote compilers for Algol60 (later updated for Algol60M) based on their Atlas Autocode compilers initially bootstrapped from the Atlas to the KDF-9. The Edinburgh compilers generated code for the ICL1900, the ICL4/75 (an IBM360 clone), and the ICL2900. Here is the BNF for Algol60 and the ICL2900 compiler source, library documentation, and a considerable test suite including Brian Wichmann's tests. Also there is a rather superficial Algol60 to Atlas Autocode source-level translator.
Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement...

's Retrocomputing Museum, among others a link to the NASE Algol-60 interpreter written in C.
The NASE interpreter
Stories about Burrough's B5000 http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
NUMAL A Library of Numerical Procedures in ALGOL 60 developed at The Stichting Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (legal successor of Stichting Mathematisch Centrum) legal owner.

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