ALGOL

ALGOL 60 came out of a European-American committee and was described in a report edited by Peter Naur. With it came block structure using begin/end, lexical scoping, recursive calls and call-by-name parameters — and above all a formal description of the syntax, the notation now called Backus-Naur form. It was the first time a language was defined mathematically rather than by its compiler.

Commercially it lost to Fortran and COBOL, partly because IBM would not back it. Instead it became the language of the journals: Communications of the ACM published algorithms in ALGOL for two decades. Tony Hoare summed up its legacy as "an improvement on nearly all of its successors" as well as its predecessors. The successor ALGOL 68 grew too large and too hard to read, and the dissenters Wirth and Hoare went off and built Pascal instead.