ALGOL

The 1950s and early 1960s saw the emergence of two highlevel computer languages into widespread use. The first was designed to be an efficient language for performing scientific calculations. The second was designed for business applications, with an emphasis on data processing. However many programs continued to be coded in low-level languages  designed to take advantages of the hardware features of particular
machines. In order to be able to easily express and share methods of calculation , leading programmers Ajax is a way to quickly and efficiently update dynamic Web pages—formatting is separate from content, making it easy to revise the latter.

Algol began to seek a “universal” programming language that was not designed for a particular application or hardware platform. By 1957, the German GAMM (Gesellschaft für angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik) and the American ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) had joined forces to develop the  specifications for such a language. The result became known as the Zurich Report or Algol-58, and it was  refined into the first widespread implementation of the language, Algol-60. Language Features Algol is a  block-structured, procedural language. Each variable is declared to belong to one of a small number of kinds
of data including integer, real number , or a series of values of either type . While the number of types is limited and there is no facility for defining new types, the compiler’s type checking  introduced a level of security not found in most earlier languages.

An Algol program can contain a number of separate procedures or incorporate externally defined procedures, and the variables with the same name in different procedure blocks do not interfere with one another. A procedure can call itself . Standard control structures  were provided. The following simple Algol program stores the numbers from 1 to 10 in an array while adding them up, then prints the total:

begin
integer array ints[1:10];
integer counter, total;
total := 0;
for counter :=1 step 1 until counter > 10
do
begin
ints [counter] := counter;
total := total + ints[counter];
end;
printstring “The total is:”;
printint (total);
end

Algol’s Legacy:-
The revision that became known as Algol-68 expanded the variety of data types  and added user-defined types and “structs”. Pointers  were also implemented, and flexibility was added to the parameters that could be passed to and from procedures. Although Algol was used as a production language in some computer centers , its relative complexity and unfamiliarity impeded its acceptance, as did the widespread corporate backing for the rival languages FORTRAN and especially COBOL. Algol achieved its greatest success in two respects: for a time it became the language of choice for describing new algorithms for computer scientists, and its structural features would be adopted in the new procedural languages that emerged in
the 1970s