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SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)

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Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)

#6

Post by mountainofdeath »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #4

I remember this as one of the computer languages you would list to make it seem like you knew a lot about computer languages. ... in the 1980s ... Of course nobody actually knew or used it.

True. I had a professor mention SNOBOL a few times in lectures. The same professor only taught classes in Scheme, including CS 101 and Software Engineering. The man was stuck in the 80s in every way.

Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)

#7

Post by hello_computer »

Of particular interest:

A SNOBOL pattern can be very simple or extremely complex. A simple pattern is just a text string (e.g. "ABCD"), but a complex pattern may be a large structure describing, for example, the complete grammar of a computer language. It is possible to implement a language interpreter in SNOBOL almost directly from a Backus–Naur form expression of it, with few changes. Creating a macro assembler and an interpreter for a completely theoretical piece of hardware could take as little as a few hundred lines, with a new instruction being added with a single line.

...

Patterns can be saved like any other first-class data item, and can be concatenated, used within other patterns, and used to create very complex and sophisticated pattern expressions. It is possible to write, for example, a SNOBOL4 pattern which matches "a complete name and international postal mailing address", which is well beyond anything that is practical to even attempt using regular expressions.

Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)

#8

Post by geophile »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #4

I remember this as one of the computer languages you would list to make it seem like you knew a lot about computer languages. ... in the 1980s ... Of course nobody actually knew or used it.

This is just completely wrong.

I learned and used SNOBOL for RBK Dewar's compiler classes at NYU, 78-79. (Dewar was one of the authors of SPITBOL, an implementation of the language).

Because of this, experience, a couple of years later, in grad school elsewhere, I was able to help someone in the computing center debug a client's SNOBOL program.

Sure, this wasn't a huge insurance company writing their payroll system, but SNOBOL was a real language. But ignoring that: SNOBOL was a completely unique language, beautiful in its own way. It looked like a very sparse form of assembler language. Control flow was bizarre: a statement could "succeed" or "fail", and a statement could specify goto targets for either, both, or none of these cases. (I don't know the exact dates, but SNOBOL must have been designed around the same time as the famous "Goto considered harmful" letter.)

As a measure of how good the language was: SNOBOL is famously based on the idea of string pattern matching. I found SNOBOL completely intuitive and easy to use. By contrast, I find UNIX regular expressions incomprehensible, and they send me to RTFM each time I use them. I have a similar view of Perl. Ugly and unintuitive, the exact opposite of SNOBOL.

Also, I would like to recommend the Griswold, Poage, and Polonski book on SNOBOL4. I remember it as a truly excellent language book, on the level of K&R.

Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)

#10

Post by pavlov »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #4

I remember this as one of the computer languages you would list to make it seem like you knew a lot about computer languages. ... in the 1980s ... Of course nobody actually knew or used it.

Imagining some 1980s Hacker News clickbait #1 headlines:

  - Towers of Hanoi in SNOBOL
  - It's true: Ada on CP/M
  - Discover your inner extrovert with Smalltalk-80
  - In the '90s everything will be in Eiffel
  - How to ace your next Modula-2 interview
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