Comment by trealira

> Algol was designed based on observational data of how programmers, who had to somehow turn their ideas into the assembler to run on machines, would write out those ideas. Before it was code, it was pseudocode, and the origins predate electronic computers: pseudocode was used to express algorithms to computers, when that was a profession rather than an object.

I believe you, but do you have a source for this? I can't find papers on how they chose to develop the syntax of Algol in the beginning.