The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
ALGOL 60
ALGOL
ALGOrithmic Language 1960.
A portable language for scientific computations. ALGOL 60 was
small and elegant. It was block-structured, nested,
recursive and free form. It was also the first language
to be described in BNF.
There were three lexical representations: hardware,
reference, and publication. The only structured data types
were arrays, but they were permitted to have lower bounds
and could be dynamic. It also had conditional expressions;
it introduced :=; if-then-else; very general "for" loops;
switch declaration (an array of statement labels
generalising Fortran's computed goto). Parameters were
call-by-name and call-by-value. It had static local
"own" variables. It lacked user-defined types, character
manipulation and standard I/O.
See also EULER, ALGOL 58, ALGOL 68, Foogol.
["Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60", Peter Naur
ed., CACM 3(5):299-314, May 1960].
(1995-01-25)