ALGOL 60

ALGOL 60 (short for ALGOrithmic Language 1960) is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them. ALGOL 60 was the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including CPL, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal and C.

Niklaus Wirth based his own ALGOL W on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published. Algol 68 is substantially different from Algol 60 and was criticised partially for being so, so that in general "Algol" refers to dialects of Algol 60.

Standardization

ALGOL 60 — with COBOL — were the first languages to seek standardization.