ALGOL 60 was an international algorithmic language defined in the “Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60,” edited by Peter Naur and published in Communications of the ACM in 1960. The committee behind it included leading figures such as John Backus, John McCarthy, Alan Perlis, and Friedrich Bauer. The report’s stated purpose was to provide a complete description of a common language for expressing numerical processes in a form suitable for translation into machine programs.
The report introduced several ideas that became permanent features of programming. Block structure let programmers group statements into nested blocks, each with its own local variables, which is the basis of lexical scope. Procedures could call themselves recursively. These concepts gave programs a clear, hierarchical organization.
Equally important was how the language was described. The report used a formal grammar notation, now known as Backus-Naur Form or BNF, to specify the syntax precisely. This was one of the first times a programming language had a rigorous, machine-checkable definition, and BNF became the standard way to describe language grammars.
ALGOL 60 was not as widely used in industry as Fortran or COBOL, but its influence on language design was enormous. Its block structure and scoping flowed into Pascal, C, and most modern languages, and it gave researchers a precise vocabulary for studying programming itself.