The Algol-60 report was written between 1959 and 1960 by a team of programming language experts consisting of editor Peter Naur and several educators and practitioners from Europe and the United States. The purpose of the report was to develop a complete description of an international algorithmic language for expressing numerical processes in a form suitable for translation into computer programming languages. It was not intended to be a programming language, although it was subsequently implemented as a language and became popular in Europe.

Many versions of the Algol programming language were implemented in the 1960s and early 1970s. It also led to the development of several other programming languages, such as Pascal, implemented by Niklaus Wirth in the early 1970s, and C.

The report introduced the notions of a reference language, a publication language, and a hardware representation. The reference language was the standard for the report...