ALGOL W

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ALGOL W

Paradigms Multi-

paradigm: procedural, imperative, structured

Family ALGOL

Designed by Niklaus Wirth, Tony Hoare

First appeared 1966; 56 years ago

Typing discipline Static, strong

Scope Lexical

Implementation PL360

language

Platform IBM System/360

OS Linux

Influenced by

ALGOL 60

Influenced

Pascal, Modula-2

ALGOL W is a programming language. It is based on a proposal for ALGOL

X by Niklaus Wirth and Tony Hoare as a successor to ALGOL 60. ALGOL W is a
relatively simple upgrade of the original ALGOL 60, adding string,
bitstring, complex number and reference to record data types and call-by-
result passing of parameters, introducing the while statement,
replacing switch with the case statement, and generally tightening up the
language.
Wirth's entry was considered too little of an advance over ALGOL 60, and the more
complex entry from Adriaan van Wijngaarden was selected in a highly contentious
meeting. Wirth later published his version as A contribution to the development of
ALGOL.[1] With a number of small additions, this eventually became ALGOL W.
Wirth supervised a high quality implementation for the IBM System/360 at Stanford
University that was widely distributed.[2][3]

The implementation was written in PL360, an ALGOL-like assembly language

designed by Wirth. The implementation includes influential debugging and
profiling abilities.

ALGOL W served as the basis for the Pascal language, and the syntax of ALGOL
W will be immediately familiar to anyone with Pascal experience. The key
differences are improvements to record handling in Pascal, and, oddly, the loss of
ALGOL W's ability to define the length of an array at runtime, which is one of
Pascal's most-complained-about features.

Contents

• 1Syntax and semantics

• 2Example
• 3Implementation
• 4References
• 5External links

Syntax and semantics[edit]

ALGOL W's syntax is built on a subset of the EBCDIC character encoding set.
In ALGOL 60, reserved words are distinct lexical items, but in ALGOL W they are
only sequences of characters, and do not need to be stropped. Reserved words
and identifiers are separated by spaces.[2] In these ways ALGOL W's syntax
resembles that of Pascal and later languages.
The ALGOL W Language Description[4] defines ALGOL W in an affix grammar that
resembles Backus–Naur form (BNF). This formal grammar was a precursor of
the Van Wijngaarden grammar.[1][5]
Much of ALGOL W's semantics is defined grammatically:[4]
 • Identifiers are distinguished by their definition within the current scope.
For example, a ⟨procedure identifier⟩ is an identifier that has been
defined by a procedure declaration, a ⟨label identifier⟩ is an identifier
that is being used as a goto label.
• The types of variables and expressions are represented by affixes. For
example ⟨τ function identifier⟩ is the syntactic entity for a function
that returns a value of type τ , if an identifier has been declared as an
integer function in the current scope then that is expanded to ⟨integer
function identifier⟩ .
• Type errors are grammatical errors. For example, ⟨integer expression⟩
/ ⟨integer expression⟩ and ⟨real expression⟩ / ⟨real
expression⟩ are valid but distinct syntactic entities that represent
expressions, but ⟨real expression⟩ DIV ⟨integer expression⟩ (i.e.,
integer division performed on a floating-point value) is an invalid
syntactic entity.

Example[edit]
This demonstrates ALGOL W's record type facility.

RECORD PERSON (
STRING(20) NAME;
INTEGER AGE;
LOGICAL MALE;
REFERENCE(PERSON) FATHER, MOTHER, YOUNGESTOFFSPRING, ELDERSIBLING
);

REFERENCE(PERSON) PROCEDURE YOUNGESTUNCLE (REFERENCE(PERSON) R);

BEGIN
REFERENCE(PERSON) P, M;
P := YOUNGESTOFFSPRING(FATHER(FATHER(R)));
WHILE (P ¬= NULL) AND (¬ MALE(P)) OR (P = FATHER(R)) DO
P := ELDERSIBLING(P);
M := YOUNGESTOFFSPRING(MOTHER(MOTHER(R)));
WHILE (M ¬= NULL) AND (¬ MALE(M)) DO
M := ELDERSIBLING(M);
IF P = NULL THEN
M
ELSE IF M = NULL THEN
P
ELSE
IF AGE(P) < AGE(M) THEN P ELSE M
END

Implementation[edit]
The major part of ALGOL W, amounting to approximately 2,700 cards, was written
in Wirth's PL360. An interface module for the IBM operating system (OS) in use
(OS, DOS, MTS, ORVYL) was written in IBM assembly language, amounting to
fewer than 250 cards. [1]
In an OS environment on a 360/67 with spooled input and output files, the compiler
will recompile itself in about 25 seconds. The compiler is approximately 2700 card
images. Thus, when the OS scheduler time is subtracted from the execution time
given above, it is seen that the compiler runs at a speed in excess of 100 cards per
second (for dense code).
In a DOS environment on a 360/30, the compiler is limited only by the speed of the
card reader. The compiler has successfully recompiled itself on a 64K 360/30 at a
rate of 1200 cards per minute (the speed of the card reader). This is impressive
when compared to the time needed for the DOS Assembler to assemble the
interface module which consists of under 250 cards. When the macro instructions
are expanded, the DOS interface has 972 card images and the Assembler takes
15 minutes for the assembly.

References[edit]
1. ^ Jump up to:a b Wirth, Niklaus; Hoare, C. A. R. (June 1966). "A contribution to the
development of ALGOL". Communications of the ACM. 9: 413–432. Retrieved 7
October 2020 – via Association for Computing Machinery.
2. ^ Jump up to:a b Bauer, Henry R.; Becker, Sheldon I.; Graham, Susan L.; Forsythe,
George E.; Satterthwaite, Edwin H. (March 1968). Technical Report Number: CS-TR-
68-89. Computer Science Department (Report). Stanford University. (Various
documents for Stanford's 1972 implementation of ALGOL W; this report includes
the ALGOL W Language Description.
3. ^ Sites, Richard. "ALGOL W Reference Manual" (PDF). i.stanford.edu. Stanford
University. Retrieved 24 July 2022.
4. ^ Jump up to:a b Bauer, Henry R.; Becker, Sheldon I.; Graham, Susan L.; Satterthwaite,
Edwin H.; Sites, Richard L. (June 1972). ALGOL W Language
Description (PDF) (Report).
5. ^ van Wijngaarden, Adriaan (22 October 1965). Orthogonal Design and Description of a
Formal Language: MR76 (PDF) (Report). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Mathematical
Centre. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 October 2019. Retrieved 7
October 2020 – via Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule Jena, University of Applied Sciences,
Germany.

External links[edit]
• aw2c – ALGOL W compiler for Linux
• awe – aw2c updated version
• ALGOL W @ Everything2 – informal but detailed description of the
language by a former user, with sidebars extolling ALGOL W
over Pascal as an educational programming language
• 1969 ALGOL W compiler listing at bitsavers.org
• The Michigan Terminal System Manuals, Volume 16: ALGOL W in MTS
• ALGOL W materials More than 200 ALGOL W programs and
documentation