ALGOL 68C

This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's layout guidelines. Please help by editing the article to make improvements to the overall structure. (July 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "ALGOL 68C" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

ALGOL 68C is an imperative computer programming language, a dialect of ALGOL 68, that was developed by Stephen R. Bourne and Michael Guy to program the Cambridge Algebra System (CAMAL). The initial compiler was written in the Princeton Syntax Compiler (PSYCO, by Edgar T. Irons) that was implemented by J. H. Mathewman at Cambridge.

ALGOL 68C was later used for the CHAOS OS for the capability-based security CAP computer at University of Cambridge in 1971. Other early contributors were Andrew D. Birrell^[1] and Ian Walker.

Subsequent work was done on the compiler after Bourne left Cambridge University in 1975. Garbage collection was added, and the code base is still running^{[clarification needed]} on an emulated OS/MVT using Hercules.

The ALGOL 68C compiler generated output in ZCODE, a register-based intermediate language, which could then be either interpreted or compiled to a native executable. This ability to interpret or compile ZCODE encouraged the porting of ALGOL 68C to many different computing platforms. Aside from the CAP computer, the compiler was ported to systems including Conversational Monitor System (CMS), TOPS-10, and Zilog Z80.