ALGOL

ALGOL is a historically significant programming language which introduced many structural concepts which are widespread in programming languages to this day. Some of its specific syntactic elements, such as := for assignments and begin and end to delimit blocks of code, were adopted directly in Pascal and Ada, though they have lost out in recent times to the alternative syntax of C which uses = for assignments and curly braces for code blocks. However, the basic structures of current languages still derive from ALGOL, even if they are expressed with different symbols. Meanwhile, the use of semicolons to end statements, taken directly from ALGOL, is used by nearly all current languages.