First package written in Algol 68 lands in Gentoo
26 points by ettolrach
26 points by ettolrach
https://git.sr.ht/~jemarch/godcc is the actual source of the package, which is a CLI to Matt Godbolt's compiler explorer.
This is quite fascinating. I'm always glad to see efforts being made to vivify moribund or dead languages. It raises some questions though:
My recollections from school ~23 years ago are that the specification indicated that there needed to be some way to denote keywords, which caused trouble (it looks like the GNU Algol 68 compiler treats them as reserved words the way modern languages do) and that it had an extremely intricate looping notation. The latter is interesting, but feels (to me) subsumed by modern iteration constructs. Beyond these, I can't recall anything noteworthy, but I'm hoping experts are around who might illuminate me.
There was a recent submission here on Lobsters, which noted that Algol 68's handling of references is exceptionally orthogonal and allows one to do away with the concept of "lvalues" or "places" naturally.
Other languages with a similar treatment of references and assignment are SML and Bliss. (OCaml is less consistent than SML in the way it supports mutability.) Algol 68 differs from SML and Bliss in that it has implicit dereferencing coercion which is supposed to do the right thing without explicit dereference operators. It always struck me as being too much magic because it isn’t clear how many levels of indirection are being traversed. But I’ve never tried it out to see if it’s better in practice than in theory.