ALCOR

ALCOR (ALGOL Converter, acronym) is an early computer language definition created by the ALCOR Group, a consortium of universities, research institutions and manufacturers in Europe and the United States which was founded in 1959 and which had 60 members in 1966. The group had the aim of a common compiler specification for a subset of ALGOL 60 after the ALGOL meeting in Copenhagen in 1958.

In addition to its programming application, as the name Algol is also an astronomical reference, to the star Algol, so too, Alcor is a reference to the star Alcor. This star is the fainter companion of the 2nd magnitude star Zeta Ursae Majoris. This was sometimes ironized as being a bad omen for the future of the language.

In Europe, a high level machine architecture for ALGOL 60 was devised which was emulated on various real computers, among them the Siemens 2002 and the IBM 7090. An ALGOL manual was published which provided a detailed introduction of all features of the language with many program snippets, and four appendixes:

This article contains Unicode 6.0 "Miscellaneous Technical" characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of something like "₁₀".

Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60
Report on Subset ALGOL 60 (IFIP)
Report on Input-Output Procedures for ALGOL 60
An early "standard" character set for representing ALGOL 60 code on paper and paper tape. This character set introduced the characters "×", ";", "[", "]", and "⏨" into the CCITT-2 code, the first two replacing "?" and the BEL control character, the others taking unused code points.

References

Baumann, R. (1961) Baumann, R. "ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group, Pts. 1, 2 & 3" Elektronische Rechenanlagen No. 5 (Oct. 1961), 206–212; No. 6 (Dec. 1961), 259–265; No. 2 (Apr. 1962); (in German)
Papertape, punched card, magnetic tape coding schemes Computer Museum, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

External links

ALCOR in The Encyclopedia of Computer Languages
The ALCOR Project, Klaus Samelson, Friedrich L. Bauer, 1962.

ALGOL programming

Implementations

Technical standards	ALGOL 58 ALGOL 60 ALGOL 68
Dialects	ABC ALGOL ALCOR ALGO ALGOL 68C ALGOL 68-R ALGOL 68RS (ELLA) ALGOL 68S ALGOL N ALGOL W ALGOL X Atlas Autocode (Edinburgh IMP) Burroughs ALGOL CORAL 66 Dartmouth ALGOL 30 DASK ALGOL DG/L Elliott ALGOL Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language (ESPOL) → New Executive Programming Language (NEWP) FLACC IMP JOVIAL Kidsgrove Algol MAD Mary NELIAC RTL/2 S-algol, PS-algol, Napier88 Simula Small Machine ALGOL Like Language (SMALL) SMIL ALGOL
Formalisms	Jensen's device Van Wijngaarden grammar

Community

Organizations

Professional associations	ALCOR Group Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) BSI Group Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification (EASC) International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 Society of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM)
Business	Burroughs Corporation Elliott Brothers Regnecentralen
Education	Case Institute of Technology University of Edinburgh University of St Andrews Manchester University Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Government	Royal Radar Establishment (RRE)

People

ALGOL 58

John Backus Friedrich L. Bauer Hermann Bottenbruch Charles Katz Alan Perlis Heinz Rutishauser Klaus Samelson Joseph Henry Wegstein
MAD	Bruce Arden Bernard Galler Robert M. Graham