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   / \  / /_  ( _ )
  / _ \| '_ \ / _ \           Collection of Algol 68 related quotes
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                                           Curated by Jose E. Marchesi


* "Why is it that Algol 68, despite almost invariably becoming the
   preferred language of anyone who takes the trouble to learn it, has
   failed to become widely used?" - Algol bulletin 49 p.6

* "As some areas of industry are beginning to realise an ALGOL 68
   prorammer can actually enjoy wha the is doing and, as a consequence
   can be very productive.  ALGOL 68 is a language for those who do
   not believe that life is infinitely long; it is for those who wish
   to avoid the experience of trying to dry a swamp with a teaspoon.
   There is no denying that (like religion?) ALGOL 68 does require
   some initial intellectual effort, but this is not as great as some
   - who have not tried - would maintain." - J.R. Oliver and
   R.S. Newton in "Practical experience with ALGOL 68-RT".

* "It has been said that Algol 60 was an improvement over most of its
   successors.  Algol 68 would have been an improvement over most of
   its successors, had it had any." - Lambert Merteens

* "A programming language that makes it really hard to write bad
   programs probably also makes it bad to write good programs." -
   Lambert Merteens

* "Algol 68 is extremely bug-resistant.  For example, in one program
   of about 1000 lines, only about four errors penetrated to run-time
   and these were uninitialised-variable errors.  Each of these
   variables were intended to have been initialised as a side effect
   of a procedure call.  By far the greatest majority of programming
   errors were caught by the mode-checking at compile-time.  As has
   been noticed elsewhere, the reason for this is that a mode
   corresponds to a number of statically verifiably properties of an
   object.  These properties may not be explicitly written in the
   program source code, which usually discusses only the
   representation of the object on the machine, and may exist only in
   the mind of the programmer.  The programmer must himself ensure
   that the primitive operations he defines preserve the properties he
   is concerned with.  Thereafter when the compiler checks mode
   compatibility it is implicitly ensuring that these properties hold,
   even though it knows nothing of the properties themselves." -
   H.J. Boom.

* "The difference between Algol 68 and other languages concerning
   coercion is twofold.  On the one hand, which coercions are to be
   applied is determined by the syntax and not by the semantics of he
   language.  This allows for a much more systematic treatment of the
   problem than .e. in PL/I.  On the other hand deciding which
   coercions have to be applied is much more context-dependent than in
   other langauges.  This increases the complexity of the algorithms
   involved." - Goos, in "Some problems in compiling ALGOL 68".