Well, I went to St.Andrews during the Napier days.<p>I didn&#x27;t use Napier myself, but some of my colleagues did, and there were frequent cries of &#x27;aaargh! My persistent store has been corrupted!&#x27; followed by rebuilding it from source.<p>But that&#x27;s not really a criticism of the language itself, merely the implementation, and I didn&#x27;t have enough experience on it to usefully comment.<p>The university was deeply into pure research, doing stuff like pure research on garbage collectors and theorem provers in Prolog (one of the lecturers wrote a theorem prover package for the Mac that we used a lot. It was all in Prolog. INCLUDING THE USER INTERFACE). But they were less good at the practical aspects of software engineering; I remember one of the lecturers arguing that we because our DEC Alpha workstations had 32MB of RAM, therefore a twin-space garbage collector of 16MB per space would be optimal...<p><i>I</i> did the persistence parts of the course in Smalltalk, which was so much simpler.<p>The paper references PS-Algol and S-Algol. I did a lot of S-Algol; it was a teaching language used by Glasgow and St.Andrews for basic algorithms courses, the intention being to decouple the algorithm from the implementation. I quite liked it, but --- remember how I said that practical software engineering at St.Andrews wasn&#x27;t so great? The Mac version had an IDE which <i>did not support cursor key movement</i>. The Unix version <i>didn&#x27;t have a garbage collector</i> (it just hadn&#x27;t been implemented).<p>Good times, good times...