ALGOL Y was the name given to a speculated successor for the ALGOL 60 programming language that incorporated some radical features that were rejected for ALGOL 68 and ALGOL X. ALGOL Y was intended to be a "radical reconstruction" of ALGOL.
One such feature was the possibility to construct new proc mode's at run-time, which was criticized as the "ability to modify its own programs at run time" while, on the other hand, it would have brought ALGOL Y to the same level of expressiveness as LISP.
"Initially the proposal for an update to Algol was Algol X, with Algol Y being the name reserved for the corresponding metalanguage. Van Wijngaarden produced a paper for the 1963 IFIP programming language committee, entitled “Generalized Algol,” which contained the basic concepts which were eventually incorporated into Algol 68."1
References
References
- "Adriaan Van Wijngaarden" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 October 2013.
- The Algollers - Reprinted from the Newsletter of the BCS ALGOL Group
- ALGOL X and ALGOL Y at the Wayback Machine (archived 20 October 2021) - Lambert Meertens - CWI Lectures in honour of Adriaan van Wijngaarden - November 2016