Algol 68 was a bit before my time, but c.1980 we did learn Algol W (W=Wirth) at Bristol Uni., which was Niklaus Wirth's idea of what Algol 68 should have been, and a predeceesor to Pascal, Modula-2, etc.
Apart from it being an interesting technical challenge or hobby is there any mundane practical reason for creating An Algol 68 compiler?
I'd love to be corrected, but my intuition tells me probably not.
The only pragmatic use for a modern Algol 68 compiler I can think of would be to port a legacy codebase to a modern system, but any existing Algol 68 codebase will likely see greater porting challenges arising out of the operating system change than from the programming language.
I prefer Simula 67 ;-)
Modula-2 happened way before my time but was quite taken by it. Especially it's fibres/coroutine features.
Apparently the Russian Glonass satellites are programmed in Modula-2 [1] which seems like a wild choice.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2#Russian_radionavigati...
Well, back in the 1980's up to early 90's, Modula-2 enjoyed a mild success in Europe.
Given that it was available in 1978, and the satellites launched in 1982, it seems a plausible choice like any other, given the computing ecosystem at the time.
Yeah, that Algol code is not very pretty :-). I'm sticking with my namesake from 1980...
One thing I always liked about some older languages was being able to have blanks in identifiers. Although I see that they actually managed to invent a new stropping variant that doesn't work with that… For the "kids"…