A bonus from van Wijngaarden's device

ABSTRACT

In [1] van Wijngaarden presented a rather remarkable technique for rewriting ALGOL 60 programs to eliminate all labels. The purpose of this note is to point out that the rewriting would also eliminate the use of array returning (procedure returning, label returning, etc.) procedures had they been legal constructs of ALGOL 60. Hence, the many languages which allow such things to be returned as procedure values are not such large extensions of ALGOL 60 as one might think [2, 3, 4, 5].

REFERENCES

• 1: van Wijngaarden, A. Recursive definition of syntax and semantics, in Formal Language Description Languages for Computer Programming, T.B. Steel Jr. (Ed.), North-Holland, 1966.
• 2: Berry, D.M. Introduction to Oregano. Proc. of Syrup. on Data Structures in Programming Languages, Gainesville, Fla., Feb. 1971.
• 3: Arthur Evans, Jr., PAL—a language designed for teaching programming linguistics, Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM national conference, p.395-403, August 27-29, 1968 [doi>10.1145/800186.810604]
• 4: P. J. Landin, The next 700 programming languages, Communications of the ACM, v.9 n.3, p.157-166, March 1966 [doi>10.1145/365230.365257]
• 5: John C. Reynolds, G/EDANKEN—a simple typeless language based on the principle of completeness and the reference concept, Communications of the ACM, v.13 n.5, p.308-319, May 1970 [doi>10.1145/362349.362364]
• 6: Johnston, J.B. The contour model for block structured processes. Proc. of Syrup. on Data Structures in Programming Languages, Gainesville, Fla., Feb. 1971.
• 7: Wegner, P. Data structure models for programming languages. Proc. of Syrup. on Data Structures in Programming Languages, Gainesville, Fla., Feb. 1971.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
non-local transfers, procedure returns