Re: Old Manuals
But more seriously, my early programming experience at school from 1973 was learning Algol-60 from an ICL Manual and using the formal Algol-60 Revised Report (in BNF) as bedtime reading.
May be an apochryphal story but I recollect hearing that the original Algol-60 compiler developers used a parser generator which generated the progam parsing code from the BNF description .... and initially it had a single error message which simply stated "Not a valid Algol-60 program"