Introduction to ALGOL

the long version

"ALGOL has found interest throughout the computing community. The defining report was not intended to be a primer, however, since its aim of strict syntactic and semantic description did not allow this. This book is intended to give a needed introduction to ALGOL, which should enable the nonspecialist, for whose benefit ALGOL was primarily conceived, to write clear and readable ALGOL programs from which a reasonable translator will produce efficient machine codes." --Preface, page v.