The Amsterdam Plot!
summary
1958–1960 effort produces ALGOL 58 then ALGOL 60; a five‑day Paris meeting finalizes a standard that mostly fixes arithmetic, blocks, procedures and portability, but a one‑line insertion in section 5.4 quietly reintroduces recursion added by tiny wording and sparks a storm later nicknamed The Amsterdam Plot. Implementations and journals adopt ALGOL 60 immediately, and that accidental recursion capability directly enables concise algorithms like Quicksort and wider advances in algorithm design.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:10Choosing features
- 2:37Birth of ALGOL 58
- 4:03ALGOL 60 conference
- 6:52Amsterdam phone call
- 9:23ALGOL 60 recursion impact
- 12:57Lessons for teams
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