Re: c++ "with" keyword

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

> Believe that if you wish.  I'm not a betting man.  The Algol 68
> language had no implementations when it was standardized -- AFAIK the
> first delivery was 1977!

That's serious misinformation. Algol-68R, which was widely used in universities
industry and defence applications first appeared in 1970 (I was at Leeds
in the summer of 1971 and used the compiler extensively at that time, it
was in excellent shape). Algol-68R was a very large subset, with only a few
restrictions (it was much closer to full Algol-68 than any "C++" compiler
was to the first C++ standard when it appeared). 

(Good thing you did not take on the bet, sounds like you have never programmed
in Algol-68 :-)

The first complete full language implementation for the CDC was delivered
in 1974 only a couple of years after the revised report.

1976 saw the appearence of Algol-68S, the widely used subset on the PDP-11
(that's the subset I had my students write self-bootstrapping compilers
on Knuth's new MIX machine, we ended up with about 10 fully bootstrapped
compilers from a one semester course -- so it's not *that* hard to implement)

In fact, A68 is a much easier language to implement than C++ or Ada or F90
or Java I would say. Once again, the issue was general resources. We have
seen how difficult it has been to get g++ into reasonably complete shape,
and that's with far more investment of volunteer and paid effort than went
into any Algol-68 compiler. And the time scale for g++ was indeed far longer
than for the A68 compilers that did appear. It is indeed a pity that no
nice implementation appeared on the IBM mainframes.

In fact, to get back to something at least a big relevant to this mailing
list, this was a place where free software principles would have made all
the difference. 

There was in fact a VERY nice compiler for the IBM mainframes which appeared
in 1978. Remember this is a full featured language with strong abstraction
capabilities, full garbage collection, and built-in multi-threading
capabiltiies, appearing 25 years ago. But unfortunately the authors decided
to try to make money, and sold it for a very large amount of money (comparable
to what IBM charged for major compilers). I think they sold precisely three
copies to Canadian universities. I pleaded with them to make it more generally
available, but unsuccessfully. I think if we had todays free software and
open source environment, and that compiler had been distributed that way,
we might have seen a very different history for Algol-68.