I present here a small bibliography of papers on programming languages from the 1970’s. I have personally considered these papers interesting in my research on the syntax of programming languages. I give here short annotations and comments (adapted to modern’s day notions) on some of these papers.

Concrete syntax does make a difference. :-)

ALGOL 68 might-have-beens, by S. G. van der Meulen (1977)

About “natural, easy to implement and orthogonal” features missing from Algol. 10+ such features are mentioned.

Collateral loop statement with i,j thru hilbert do hilbert(i,j) := 1/(i+j-1) od , to be used instead of nested loops.

, to be used instead of nested loops. Mutable/immutable state: assignments x := y; vs. x := copy y;

vs. Four new kinds of ref: refix — assignable only (“write-only”), refex — dereferencable only (“read-only”), ref — both assignable and dereferenceable, fer — neither assignable nor dereferenceable, for transfer only.

Moral (according to the author):

a next language should be one which is truly extensible in the sense that a programmer can specify his own might-have beens and declare them within the framework of the language

Doesn’t it resemble language-oriented / intentional programming? ;-)