The development of Algol played an important role in establishing computer science as an academic discipline. The Algol 68 Genie project preserves and promotes Algol 68 out of educational as well as scientific-historical interest, by making available a recent checkout compiler-interpreter written from scratch by Marcel van der Veer. Algol 68 Genie is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Algol 68 Genie is a fast compiler-interpreter which ranks among the most complete implementations of the language; it supports for instance partial parametrisation, parallel processing, formatted transput and a refinement preprocessor.

A detailed description of Algol 68 is in the book Learning Algol 68 Genie which contains an informal introduction to the language, a manual for Algol 68 Genie, and the Revised Report on Algol 68.

Recently, the well-known book Informal Introduction to Algol 68 by C.H. Lindsey and S.G. van der Meulen [1977], was made available online. Algol 68 Genie and its documentation, together with this book, provide an excellent way to study Algol 68.

Algol 68 is a secure, expression-oriented programming language with which you elegantly code algorithms without having to bother too much about irrelevant technical details and limitations inherent to many other languages.

Algol 68 Genie offers for example:
» many runtime checks facilitating debugging and improving the reliability of your programs,
» native support for arbitrary precision arithmetic including complex numbers,
» syntactic constructions to support linear algebra,
» a gdb-style debugger and a pretty-printer to beautify source code,
» optional linkage to GNU plotutils, the GNU scientific library or PostgreSQL,
» extensions as UNIX pipes, regular expression matching, and web page content fetching.

The algol68g-2.6 distribution released in November 2012 lets you build Algol 68 Genie on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris or Cygwin from source code. Detailed installation instructions are in the book Learning Algol 68 Genie. A hyperlinked HTML version of the Revised Report is available from these project pages. For interested developers, the Algol 68 Genie Technical Reference, is available.

Algol 68 Genie comprises circa 70,000 lines ANSI C code. The implementation is regression tested with a suite totalling roughly 300,000 lines Algol 68 code in 1,500+ programs, the largest program having ± 35,000 lines of code. The suite includes the well known Mathematisch Centrum Algol 68 Test Set and the synthetic Bernard Houssais test set, both available from Dick Grune's web site or from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The test suite also includes programs from Rosetta Code and Code Codex.

For Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, an algol68g-2.6 WIN32 executable is available which is linked to GNU plotutils and the GNU scientific library. Unzip it and execute it from the Windows command line interpreter cmd.exe.

Prebuilt binaries have been posted for Linux, Mac OS X, Debian, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Fedora, RedHat, Ubuntu, Cygwin and Arch Linux. An important repository is the Algol 68 project on SourceForge .