GNU Tools Cauldron 2025

Algol 68 was designed by the Working Group 2.1 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) during the late 1960s and early 1970s, leaded by Adriaan van Wijngaarden. The goal of the working group was to provide a programming language suitable to communicate algorithms, to execute them efficiently on a variety of different computers, and to aid in teaching them to students. The resulting language was in principle expected to be an evolved version of Algol 60, known shortcomings addressed, and generally improved. However, what was initially supposed to be an improved version of Algol 60 turned out to be something very different: an extremely powerful programming language, more modern and more expressive than most programming languages today, whose design exercised almost to the limit the newly invented notion of orthogonality in programming languages. Algol 68 is not like Algol 60, an important but old fashioned programming language superseded in almost every aspect by its successors, only relevant nowadays as a historical curiosity. Despite of many people claiming otherwise, Algol 68 has no successors. The GNU Algol 68 Working Group is a group of hackers whose purpose is to bring Algol 68 back to the first line of programming where it belongs, to provide modern implementations of the language well integrated in today's operating systems and computers (like the GCC Algol 68 front-end), to produce documentation to help people to learn this fascinating language, and to explore extensions and evolve the language with the rigor, respect and seriousness that it deserves and demands.

In January 2025 a first work-in-progress patch series implementing an Algol 68 front-end for GCC got sent to gcc-patches. Since then, the development has continued at a steady pace and by now most of the language has been implemented. In this talk we will introduce the front-end and the world domination plan associated with it, will highlight and discuss some interesting aspects of the implementation (Algol 68 is a notoriously difficult to implement language) and will make a case for the inclusion of the front-end in the main GCC tree.

We will also briefly look at some of the tangent projects like the Algol 68 support in the autotools and the a68 Emacs mode, as time allows.

References:
- Front-end development homepage: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Algol68FrontEnd
- Git repository: https://forge.sourceware.org/gcc/gcc-a68
- Algol 68 homepage: https://algol68-lang.org