On Dec 16, 2020, at 8:08 PM, John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote: Funny how we seem to rehash the same things over the years! In a 1988 comp.lang.misc thread when I expressed hope that "a major subset of Algol 68 with a new and concise syntax (sort of like C's) can make a very elegant, type safe and well rounded language.", Piet van Oostrum[1] commented the combination of dynamic arrays *and* unions forced the use of GC in Algol68. Either feature by themselves wouldn't have required GC! The larger point being that compiler complexity is "almost exponential" (his words) to the number of added features. Piet and others also wrote that both Pascal and C had left out a lot of the hard things in A68. So I doubt A68 or a subset would have replaced C or Pascal in 70s-80s. [My exposure to Algol68 was when I had stumbled upon Brailsford and Walker's wonderful "Introductory Algol 68 programming" @ USC. After having used PL/I, Pascal & Fortran the regularity of A68 was quite enticing but AFAIK no one used A68 at USC. I must admit I still like it more than modern languages like Java, Go, Rust, C++, ...] [1] Piet had implemented major parts of both A68 and A60.