It was heavily influenced by ALGOL 60, but instead of being extremely small, elegant and simple, CPL was intended for a wider application area than scientific calculations and was therefore much more complex and not as elegant as ALGOL 60.
CPL attempted to go beyond ALGOL to include industrial process control, business data processing and possibly some early command line games.
[4] CPL was intended to allow low-level programming and high level abstractions using the same language.
The first CPL compiler was probably written about 1970,[5] but the language never gained much popularity and seems to have disappeared without trace sometime in the 1970s.
The function MAX as formulated by Peter Norvig:[5] The closing section block symbol used here (̸§) is an approximation of the original symbol, in which the cross stroke is vertical.