ALGOL, short for Algorithmic Language, was a family of programming languages created by an international committee of European and American computer scientists in the late 1950s. The first version appeared as ALGOL 58, and a more influential revision, ALGOL 60, followed after meetings in Zurich and Paris. It was designed to describe algorithms in a clear, machine-independent way and was widely used in universities and for publishing algorithms in journals. ALGOL introduced or popularised block structure, nested scopes and recursion, and its syntax was described using a formal notation later known as Backus-Naur form. Few commercial programs were written in it, but it shaped Pascal, C, Simula and many later languages, which is why it is often called the ancestor of modern programming languages.
Before and after
- 23 December 1958Construction of Tokyo Tower
- 1959Invention of Floyd–Warshall algorithm
- 1959Construction of Ngorongoro Conservation Area
- 1959HIV/AIDS
- 1959Creation of ALGOL
- from 1959 to 1961Great Chinese Famine
- 1959Construction of Boryspil International Airport
- 1959Founding of York University
- 1959Invention of Dijkstra's algorithm
More in Science & technology
- 25 April 1953Watson and Crick publish the structure of DNA
- 1971Email
- 1973Mobile phone
- 20 November 1985Creation of Microsoft Windows
- July 2000Discovery of livermorium
- August 2003Discovery of moscovium
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.