ALGOL Y was the name given to a speculated successor for the ALGOL 60 programming language that incorporated some radical features that were rejected for

ALGOL 68 ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language member of the ALGOL family that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and ...

and ALGOL X. ALGOL Y was intended to be a "radical reconstruction" of ALGOL. One such feature was the possibility to construct new proc mode's at run-time, which was criticized as the "ability to modify its own programs at run time" while, on the other hand, it would have brought ALGOL Y to the same level of expressiveness as

LISP Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. "Initially the proposal for an update to Algol was Algol X, with Algol Y being the name reserved for the corresponding metalanguage. Van Wijngaarden produced a paper for the 1963 IFIP programming language committee, entitled “Generalized Algol,” which contained the basic concepts which were eventually incorporated into Algol 68

References

* http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/algol/ACM_Algol_bulletin/1061688/p8-de_morgan.pdf
ALGOL X and ALGOL Y
- Lambert Meertens - CWI Lectures in honour of Adriaan van Wijngaarden - November 2016 Algol programming language family {{compu-lang-stub

See also

References