FIRST EDITION OF THE GIER ALGOL 4 MANUAL.

NAUR, PETER [EDT].

A Manual of Gier Algol 4.

Copenhagen, A/S Regnecentralen, 1967.

8vo. In the original yellow printed wrappers. Former owner's stamp (K. Egelund Larsen) to front- and back-wrapper as well as title-page. 89 pp. A bit of wear to extremities, a bit of soiling to wrappers and a few spots to front wrapper. Internally nice and clean.

First edition of the Gier Algol 4 manual, a users' manual of the Algol 60 compiler system for the Gier computer (known as Gier Algol 4). The Algol 60 programming language was exceedingly influential and innovative and gave rise to many other programming languages, such as BCPL, B, Pascal, Simula and C.

It is stated on the title-page that this is the "Third edition of A Manual of Gier Algol", which means, not that this is a later printing/edition of the paper, but that it is the third version of Gier Algol, being the 4th paper in the Algol series.

"Where Algol 58 was considered quite properly to be a draft, Algol 60 was appriciated, almost immediately, as a rounded work of art. It was to become a universal tool with which to view, study, and proffer solutions to almost every kind of problem in computation." (Origins of Cyberspace 813).
"The language was designed by a committee of American and European computer scientists to address some of the problems with Fortran programming language. It had significant influence on later programming language design. John Backus developed a method for describing the syntax of the Algol 58 programming language. This was revised and expanded by Peter Nauer for Algol 60 and the resulting approach is known as Backus Naur form." (O'Regan, Gerard. A brief history of computing, 2008, 80 p.).

The Gier Algol 4 was developed by the leading Danish computer scientists at that time: Tove Asmussen, Jørn Jensen, Søren Lauesen, Paul Lindgreen, Per Mondrup, Jørgen Zachariassen and Peter Nauer, the later being a pioneer in computer science; in 2005 he won the ACM A.M. Turing Award for his work on defining the ALGOL 60 programming language. The N in the BNF notation stands for Nauer. (Backus-Naur form).

Order-nr.: 43108