[adrian_b]

Moreover, they have already been proposed by John McCarthy in October 1964, 60 years ago, for inclusion in the successor of ALGOL 60, which makes even more weird the lack of widespread support.

(And in fact Algol 68 had a better implementation than most later languages, but Algol 68 was missing completely any documentation suitable for newbies, like tutorials and programming examples, while not being promoted by any hardware vendor, like IBM or DEC, so it was doomed.)

[floxy]

>The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques which put them into practice, the more is my amazement and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Hoare_Hi...