>>16
ANY language being compared to Algol would be an honor. Several of the CS VIP of the 60s participated in it (LISP guy, FORTRAN guy, EWD), BNF notation originated for Algol alone, it just so happens to be useful elsewhere, Knuth devised algorithms just for Algol. All languages other than COBOL and FORTRAN in use right now have features that descend directly from any of the Algols, even
bash (Bourne was on the 68 committee). Algol was the state of the art, and compared to a lot of the languages in vogue on TIOBE right now it still is.
It fell into over-design though, even after they had to leave out a bunch of stuff, the language was very extensible, had at least 5 standard encoding representations (book form - yes the language has an ``MS Word'' mode, ASCII-like, and various non-ASCII forms), standard support for keywords in multiple human languages, it had something like 8 kinds of ``nothing'' values.