About this project
Algol 60 is the mother of nearly all imperative programming languages existing today. And it turns 60 years this year (2020) which is a good reason to take again a closer look at it. The original Algol 60 language report appeared in May 1960 in the venerable Communications of the ACM. For several years I have been thinking about building a compiler for the language Simula 67 which is a superset of Algol 60. To build a parser (and possibly a compiler) for Algol 60 is therefore on the way to the Simula compiler. So here we go.
Algol was the first language which was specified using the "Backus–Naur form" (BNF), yet another pioneering achievment. I took the BNF from the revised report and converted it in an LL(1) EBNF using my EbnfStudio tool (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/EbnfStudio, which I had to extend a bit to handle the unusual unicode symbols used by Algol).
The generated parser successfully reads the examples of Marst, Katwijk-algol-60, racket-algol60 and swornimgrg-algol60; it also successfully parses all Marst test cases besides the ones with intentional syntax errors. The AlgLc application can be used to parse all algol files in a directory.
I also implemented a syntax highlighter and a little Algol60 editor based on Qt (called AlgLjEditor, see screenshot). I added a LuaJIT terminal and bytecode viewer in case I will implement an Algol 60 to LuaJIT bytecode compiler (as I already did e.g. in https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon). This is work in progress.
Binary versions
Not yet available.
Build Steps
Follow these steps if you want to build the application yourself:
- Make sure a Qt 5.x (libraries and headers) version compatible with your C++ compiler is installed on your system.
- Download the source code from https://github.com/rochus-keller/Algol60/archive/master.zip and unpack it.
- Goto the unpacked directory and execute
QTDIR/bin/qmake AlgLjEditor.pro(see the Qt documentation concerning QTDIR). - Run make; after a couple of seconds you will find the executable in the build directory.
Alternatively you can open AlgLjEditor.pro using QtCreator and build it there.
Support
If you need support or would like to post issues or feature requests please use the Github issue list at https://github.com/rochus-keller/Algol60/issues or send an email to the author.