When I was a sysadmin at the Naval Research Laboratory in the 80s, I was asked to install Icon, Ralph Griswold’s follow-on language to SNOBOL. I had a little trouble installing it on our Gould minicomputer and mailed in a support request. It was answered by Griswold himself! I felt special! (It was just a Makefile issue, as I recall. This was the era of tar source file distribution. No rpms, no snaps, no debs.)
SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
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Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#12I 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
I think "Towers of Hanoi in SNOBOL" would get to first page even today.
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#13I 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,…
Seems like you know a lot about computer languages
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#14I 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.
I took a class on programming languages from Douglas Maurer, who had written a book on SNOBOL. It was out of print, which saved a few dollars for the students, since he provided photocopies. SNOBOL did not look especially practical, but the built-in pattern matching made Awk and Perl that much easier to learn.
(Maurer also composes or composed music. His madrigal "Forty Bucks" set to music the text of a Montgomery County, Maryland, photo enforcement ticket.)
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I think "Towers of Hanoi in SNOBOL" would get to first page even today.
https://raganwald.com/assets/snobol-green-book.pdf
"4.6.4 Example - Tower of Hanoi" on pages 109-111 (the scanned page numbers)
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#16Oh, they found COBOLs lost brother ;)
I think COBOL is still in use today in some form[1], are there modern systems that depend on SNOBOL?
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#17I 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.
I learned SNOBOL in college, back in the early 90s. Admittedly, it was a course about computer languages in general, not SNOBOL in particular.
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#18I 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.
I took a class on programming languages from Douglas Maurer, who had written a book on SNOBOL. It was out of print, which saved a few dollars for the students, since he provided photocopies. SNOBOL did not look especially practical, but the built-in pattern matching made Awk and Perl that much easier to learn. (Maurer also composes or composed music. His madrigal "Forty Bucks" set to music the text of a Montgomery Co…
SNOBOL was the first language I learned with pattern matching. It was, at least to my memory, pretty much the main interesting feature of the language.
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#19I 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
Heh. I got into computing in the 80s, and your other headlines are much more plausible. I did find a very interesting library book Algorithms in SNOBOL4 by Gimpel, so I actually got familiar with it -- but that was sheer luck.
(The book's title is misleading now: it doesn't much overlap a modern undergrad intro to algorithms. It's more "here are examples and techniques of programming in SNOBOL".)
Re: SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "Towers of Hanoi in SNOBOL" would get to first page even today.
https://raganwald.com/assets/snobol-green-book.pdf "4.6.4 Example - Tower of Hanoi" on pages 109-111 (the scanned page numbers)
Is it even a 1980s programming language without a Hanoi example?
Here's the program in its all-caps, weirdly indented beauty:
DEFINE('HANOI(N,NS,ND,NI)') :(HANOI.END)
HANOI EQ(N,O) :S(RETURN)
HANOI(N - 1,NS,NI,ND)
OUTPUT 'MOVE DISC ' N ' FROM ' NS ' TO ' ND
HANOI(N - 1,NI,ND,NS) :(RETURN)
HANOI.END
TEST HANOI (5,'A','C','B')
END