ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language) is a family of imperative computer programming languages, originally developed in the mid-1950s, which greatly influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ACM in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years.In the sense that most modern languages are "algol-like", it was arguably the most successful of the four high-level programming languages with which it was roughly contemporary:Template:According to whom? Fortran, Lisp, and COBOL.