ALGOL is a family of imperative

Imperative programming

In computer science, imperative programming is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state...

 computer programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

s originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithm

Algorithm

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...

s were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

 and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including BCPL

BCPL

BCPL is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.- Design :...

, B, Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

, Simula

Simula

Simula is a name for two programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard...

, and C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

. ALGOL introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them and it was also the first language implementing nested function

Nested function

In computer programming, a nested function is a function which is lexically encapsulated within another function. It can only be called by the enclosing function or by functions directly or indirectly nested within the same enclosing function. In other words, the scope of the nested function is...

 definitions with lexical scope.