As
Tony Hoare put it,
Algol 60 is ``a
language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an
improvement on its
predecessors but also on nearly all its
successors''. He was referring primarily to
Pascal and
Algol 68, though the same could be said for many other
Algol-derived languages.
Algol 60, with its block structure and such, is considered the ancestor (in spirit, if not directly in fact) of most structured (procedural) languages in existence today.
Algol 60 differs from most of them, though, in that it used call-by-name rather than call-by-value or call-by-reference. That is, functions in Algol 60 actually behaved more like macros---when combined with the lack of referential transparency, this allowed such bizarre constructs as Jensen's device.
BNF was introduced in the Algol 60 Report. The term `thunk' was invented by implementors of an Algol 60 compiler.