ALGOL W

Designed by: Niklaus Wirth, Tony Hoare

Programming paradigms: Multi-paradigm — procedural, imperative, structured

ALGOL W is a programming language.

It is based on a proposal for ALGOL X by Niklaus Wirth and Tony Hoare as a successor to ALGOL 60.

ALGOL W is a relatively simple upgrade of the original ALGOL 60, adding string, bitstring, complex number and reference to record data types and call-by-result passing of parameters, introducing the while statement, replacing switch with the case statement, and generally tightening up the language.

Wirth’s entry was considered too little of an advance over ALGOL 60, and the more complex entry from Adriaan van Wijngaarden that would later become ALGOL 68 was selected in a highly contentious meeting.

Wirth later published his version as A contribution to the development of ALGOL.

With a number of small additions, this eventually became ALGOL W.

Wirth supervised a high quality implementation for the IBM System/360 at Stanford University that was widely distributed.

The implementation was written in PL360, an ALGOL-like assembly language designed by Wirth.

The implementation includes influential debugging and profiling abilities.

ALGOL W served as the basis for the Pascal language, and the syntax of ALGOL W will be immediately familiar to anyone with Pascal experience.

The key differences are improvements to record handling in Pascal, and, oddly, the loss of ALGOL W’s ability to define the length of an array at runtime, which is one of Pascal’s most-complained-about features.