Begun in 1958 by an international committee, the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), ALGOL was a hugely influential series of algorithmic programming languages. Culminating in ALGOL 60 in 1960, later languages were heavily influenced by ALGOL’s concepts for lexicon, structure, and syntax. It’s considered the first of the so called second-gen computer languages, and was the first to introduce the block structure. For a time in the early 1960s it was the predominant language in Europe, and today most modern code is a descendant of ALGOL.
