Interview with Marcel van der Veer.

[Jose E. Marchesi]

> Thank you for posting this interview. Especially valuable, IMO, is the
> inclusion to https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/10.1145/872738.807137 which I
> had never seen before, am now reading, and have already bookmarked for
> future re-reading.

That article from Van der Meulen is very interesting.  In fact, at least
two of the MHBs he suggests are in my TODO to implement as GNU
extensions to the language: to make loop clauses to yield the counter,
and the collateral clauses.

> FWIW, I fell in love with A68 in 1976 or so while a student in Oxford
> and used it during my DPhil research in molecular spectroscopy. Algol
> 68 is still by far my favourite programming language and I write
> production code for interpretation by Genie. Marcel mentions people
> who have contributed suggestions and bug reports. At least one of the
> former has been implemented and at least one of the latter
> corrected. There may well be others but memory is fading with time.
>
> Although I am incompetent at compiler construction if there is any
> other way in which I can assist in making Algol 68 a fully fledged
> member of the gcc family please let me know. If nothing else, I could
> become a cheerleader though I absolutely refuse to dress in skimpy
> clothing and wave pom-poms about  before a public audience. Somehow, I
> don't think it would have a positive effect given my age, sex and
> general appearance ;-)

:)  Thank you very much for your help.

The feedback I got from the community during the GNU Tools Cauldron
conference last weekend was very positive.  In fact, it was so positive
that I am right now busy reworking the a68 branch into a new patch
series for submission to gcc-patches ;)

The talk I gave at the conference was quite fun and, I hope, managed to
transmit to the audience that Algol 68 is not a toy language nor a
historical curiosity.

The talk slides are already uploaded to [2].

The recording video of the talk, once available, will be linked in the
same page.

https://conf.gnu-tools-cauldron.org/opo25/talk/VMJQCK/

Salud!