Re: c++ "with" keyword

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Robert Dewar writes:
 > > 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.

Well, for some unnacountable reason Lindsey doesn't say so.  He says
that the "CDC Netherlands" compiler, and I assume that's the one
you're talking about, was first delivered in 1977.  Of course, he may
be mistaken or he may have decided not to mention the 1974 deivery.

 > 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)

Fair enough.  However

a.  Algol 68 was not implemented at the time it was specified
b.  Full Algol 68 was hard to implement given the resources available
c.  The difficuly of implementing the full language hurt its sucess

Andrew.