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Logout[ALGOL (algo rithmic l anguage) was designed by a committee of American and European computer scientists during 1958–60 for publishing [algorithms, as well as for doing computations. Like [LISP (described in the next section), ALGOL had recursive subprograms—procedures that could [invokethemselves to solve a problem by reducing it to a smaller problem of the same kind. ALGOL introduced block structure, in which a program is composed of blocks that might contain both data and instructions and have the same structure as an entire program. Block structure became a powerful tool for building large programs out of small components.
ALGOL contributed a notation for describing the structure of a programming language, Backus–Naur Form, which in some variation became the standard tool for stating the [syntax of programming languages. ALGOL was widely used in Europe, and for many years it remained the language in which computer algorithms were published. Many important languages, such as [Pascaand Ada (both described later), are its descendants.