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GCC Patches Posted For Half-Century Old ALGOL 68 Programming Language

Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about..

Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Back in the early 200s there was a GPL-licensed ALGOL 68 GPL-based compiler published (a68g) and experimental GCC front-end patches before... Jose Marchesi of Oracle worked on the ALGOL 68 experimental front-end patches before but it wasn't on my bingo card to see this work trying to go mainline in GCC in 2025. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the language well will suspect this probably still holds true today, but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we shall see ;) At the very least having support in GCC will make it easier for Algol 68 enthusiasts to write, share and use their programs in modern systems.

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