[1] Unlike the earlier ALGOL 68-R, it was designed to be portable, and implemented the language of the Revised Report.
Versions of ALGOL 68RS were written for the ICL 2900 Series, Multics, and VAX running VMS.
Bond, was a great success, it suffered from two major problems: it had been written for the nearly obsolete ICL 1900 computer, and it implemented an out-of-date version of the language as it was released before the Revised Report on ALGOL 68 was available.
The compiler needed to know only the sizes of the various object machine data types and the character encoding (set) available.
A team of two programmers at Oxford University Computing Services wrote a code generator for the ICL 2900 series.
[4] Martyn Thomas of South West Universities Regional Computer Centre (SWURCC) arranged that this system be sponsored by International Computers Limited (ICL) and sold as an official ICL product.
Eventually the team at SWURCC formed a company, Praxis, initially supporting the Multics version of ALGOL 68RS.
RSRE also used the ALGOL 68RS compiler for internal projects, including the Flex machine and the ELLA hardware design language.
To this end ALGOL 68RS included indexable structures (i-structs), vectors, and the FORALL statement.
ALGOL 68 already included fixed length structures to efficiently handle characters and bit-data on word-based machines, the BYTES and BITS modes.
A program could be written with parts to be filled in later marked by a HERE tag followed by a keeplist of declarations to be made available.