What is the Full Form of ALGOL ?

ALGOL – ALGOrithmic Language

ALGOL is a high level programing language designed specifically for research computer scientists. It was first appeared in 1958 which greatly influenced many other languages. It was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in a meeting in 1958 at ETH Zurich.

The language was introduced to solve mathematical and scientific problems using algorithms. There were 3 major specifications of the language: ALGOL 58, ALGOL 60, and ALGOL 68.

AlGOL introduced block structure containing both data and instructions having the same structure like a program. It was also the first language to implement nested function definitions with lexical scope. ALGOL’s machine independence permitted the designers to be more creative, but it made implementation much more difficult.

ALGOL never reached the level of commercial popularity like COBOL and FORTRAN, but considered to be the most influential language for languages to be developed later.