ALGOL W

ALGOL W is a programming language. It was based on a proposal for ALGOL X by Niklaus Wirth and C. A. R. Hoare as a successor to ALGOL 60 in IFIP Working Group 2.1. When the committee decided that the proposal was not a sufficient advance over ALGOL 60, the proposal was published as A contribution to the development of ALGOL. After making small modifications to the language Wirth supervised a high quality implementation for the IBM/360 at Stanford University that was widely distributed.

It represented a relatively conservative modification of ALGOL 60, adding string, bitstring, complex number and reference to record datatypes and call-by-result passing of parameters, introducing the while statement, replacing switch with the case statement, and generally tightening up the language.

The implementation was written in PL/360, an ALGOL-like assembly language designed by Wirth. The implementation included influential debugging and profiling abilities.