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SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)

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

#21

Post by rootbear »

cafard wrote: post #14
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.

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…

Thank you! I took a programming languages survey course when getting my Masters at GWU in the early 90s. It was taught by Dr. Maurer. I couldn’t remember his name, but I did remember that he was into SNOBOL. I really need to find his “Forty Bucks” madrigal.

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

#25

Post by 1n3nt0r »

geophile wrote: post #8
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,…

Nice to hear mention of RBK Dewar. He was well known in the programming languages field as a professor at NYU, but also was quite successful as an entrepreneur with his various compilers (I think his company was called "Realia").

I took one of his classes as an undergraduate at NYU, but used SNOBOL, SETL, and some other early languages as part of a young scholars high school program at NYU in the early 80s.

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

#26

Post by themodelplumber »

gowld wrote: post #5

I always conflate SNOBOL with INTERCAL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

I can see why. One is a whimsically-named, serious language. The other is a seriously-named, whimsical language (from what I can tell).

(It's also somehow strange to see the author photos accompanying that article, I guess since for one, unlike many other -lang-article-photos, these seem fairly up-to-date, turning the popular-language-with-old-photos wiki-norm on its head)

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

#27

Post by AlbertCory »

dangling42 wrote: post #2

Oh, they found COBOLs lost brother ;)

Display your ignorance anytime. We're here for you.

SNOBOL was a one-of-a-kind pattern matching language at the time. Now there are lots of them, or rather, lots of regular expression features.

It had nothing whatever to do with COBOL.

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

#28

Post by guerby »

Lives in GNAT, GCC Ada:

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/ada/libgna...

  --  SPITBOL-like interface facilities

  --  This package provides a set of interfaces to semantic operations copied
  --  from SPITBOL, including a complete implementation of SPITBOL pattern
  --  matching. The code is derived from the original SPITBOL MINIMAL sources,
  --  created by Robert Dewar. The translation is not exact, but the
  --  algorithmic approaches are similar.

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

#29

Post by bachmeier »

This brings back memories of the way they used to teach programming. I had to learn some SNOBOL for a class, but to this day I've never written a line of it. We didn't even have access to such machines. Lectures were done on a chalkboard. The few programming assignments (in Pascal?) were done on our own in a lab elsewhere on campus. We'd print out the program and output and it'd be graded by hand.
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