Being safe on the internet (was Re: Here we go again - ISP DPI, but is it interception?)

[John Wilson]

On 8 August 2010 09:30, PlusNet <brg at gladman.plus.com> wrote:
> Charles Lindsey could say a lot more than I could about Algol 68.  I did spend a fair amount of time while I was at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in trying to persuade Peter Gershon (when he was with ICL) to implement it on their then new range of machines. We also attempted to get the US Dept of Defense to adopt it but they decided that they needed a new language, which emerged as Ada.

ICL had the S3 language which was highly influenced by Algol 68 and
was used to implement the systems software for the "new range"
mainframes - I worked on the first S3 compiler. There was some talk
about doing a "proper" Algol 68 implementation but the suits wanted a
PL/1 compiler so it was never funded.

Whilst Jean Ichbiah was the chief designer of Ada, John Barnes
(designer of the very beautiful RTL/2 language) contributed quite a
bit. Apparently Ichbiah was a little difficult to work with having
quite a high option of himself and his abilities. Barnes took revenge
by getting Ichbiah to give a public talk entitled "Ada's private
parts" (referring to the visibility/access control mechanism in the
language). The audience reaction was what you might expect. Apparently
it took quite a long time before Ichbiah spoke to Barnes again.


John Wilson