Abstract
The definition of a programming language consists of several parts, namely
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a)
The definition of the basic symbols, which are the atoms of the language.
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b)
The syntax (or syntactic rules); these are the rules which define how the basic symbols can be concatenated to larger units (in the following called syntactic objects) and finally to complete Algol programs.
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c)
The semantics (or semantic rules), i.e. the rules which define what actions a given Algol program (or section hereof) should initiate at execution time.
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References
The official definition of this subset is given only by the two reports RAR and SR together.
According to the SR (section 2.1) the capital letters are not basic symbols of Subset Algol 60 and are therefore available for this purpose.
Dipl. Ing. A. ScHAi, Director of the Computing Center of the ETH, Zurich, proposed this hitherto unpublished modification of the Burroughs Syntactical Chart (cf. Comm. ACM, Sept. 1961, pp. 393).
Despite the wording used in the RAR, labels are not values in this sense. Accordingly, we use here — without changing the content — a different wording which does not give labels the status of values.
It has become customary to say the value x is of type T instead of the value x belongs to class T.
It should be recognized that some of the programs published in this Handbook presume that in case of underflow (i.e. the exponent of a floating point number exceeds its lower bound) at worst the machine representation of “floating zero” is produced. Several of these programs will not work properly with computers that produce arbitrary effects upon underflow.
Lists of these reserved names are given in 15.2.1 for the standard functions and in 49.1 for the standard I/O-procedures.
The comma, which in some European countries is used as the standard separator between integer and fractional part of a number, cannot be used for that purpose in Algol. On the other hand, it is also forbidden to insert commas as digit group separators in long numbers, e.g. 1,234,567.89.
Besides this, the RAR mentions — without making further use of it — a syntactic entity called number.
According to the SR, item 3.5.1, unsigned integers are not admitted as labels in Subset Algol 60.
For the precise conditions under which a string may appear as actual parameter of a procedure call see 45.3.1.
See Dijkstra, E. W.: Algol-Bulletin [2] Nr. 12, item 12.1.
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© 1967 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Rutishauser, H. (1967). Basic Concepts. In: Bauer, F.L., Householder, A.S., Olver, F.W.J., Rutishauser, H., Samelson, K., Stiefel, E. (eds) Handbook for Automatic Computation. Die Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, vol 135. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-86934-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-86934-1_2
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