History of Science & Technology Q&A (April 20, 2022)
The Stephen Wolfram Podcast
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The History of Algol
The concept of writing a compiler for a language in the language itself was something which was certainly somewhat understood, I would say, well certainly by the 70s. The first compilers that were written in the language themselves actually were probably the compilation for C, which must have been 1976-ish timeframe, seven maybe. But anyway, Algol, I'll go 60, I think, developed the sort of formal description, and I'm afraid as has happened a few times in the history of computing, it was a big committee that invented this whole Algol specification. It wasn't really implemented completely.
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