ALGOL 68 is an imperative programming language that’s more than a half-century old and went on to inspire and influence other programming languages. It has its place in programming language history but a recently published compiler front-end for ALGOL 68 has been decided for now at least not to be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).
At the start of January patches were posted to build out an ALGOL 68 language front-end for GCC. An Oracle engineer has been hacking on the front-end for this “generally poorly understood and often vilified programming language.” This GCC front-end is capable of running numerous ALGOL 68 programs and various sample code. In case you are unfamiliar with the ALGOL 68 syntax:
The GCC steering committee at this point in time though has decided not to accept the ALGOL 68 front-end upstream. Jose E. Marchesi who has been the one working on this ALGOL 68 front-end commented on the GCC mailing list:
“The Steering Committee has decided not to merge the Algol 68 Front-End in master at this point, but is ok with us using a branch in gcc.git to develop and maintain the front-end as well as a mailing list in [email protected]. The mailing list has been already set up by the sourceware friends.
What branch should we use in gcc.git?”
The GCC Steering Committee has decided not to merge the ALGOL 68 code upstream but will allow it to be developed in a branch for those interested. In this thread it wasn’t communicated on the reasoning for the steering committee’s rejection or if they will revisit the decision in the future. But given the limited use of a modern ALGOL 68 compiler in 2025+, it’s probably not too likely this will ever be upstreamed.
