I'm confused. He starts off by asserting there were only three options; Assembly, Fortran or Algol. But then later on an essential part of the process turns out to be "a syntax-sugared, low-level language, for which a compiler was available". So why wasn't that apparently anonymous language one of the base options ?
I think that was the "compiler for a substantial subset of
Pascal using Fortran" that they originally planned to translate to Pascal after implementing it in Fortran.
