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SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)

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

#41

Post by KineticLensman »

AlbertCory wrote: post #27
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.

> It had nothing whatever to do with COBOL

Except for the name, which IIRC was an intentional dig at an early COBOL standard that defined how you pronounced 'COBOL'. 'SNOBOL' can sound like 'snow-ball', analogous to a US accent where COBOL can be pronounced 'CO-ball'.

[Edit] I used SNOBOL briefly in the 80s at Uni. It was one of the first 'odd' languages we were introduced to after Pascal, along with APL.

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

#42

Post by geophile »

1n3nt0r wrote: post #25
geophile wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember SETL, and it made a huge impression on me -- just the idea of sets as a primitive datatype. I remember one lecture on using SETL to specify language optimizations, which were set-oriented.

Also, that experience primed me for appreciating the relational model, and relational algebra, and I went on to specialize in DBMSs.

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

#43

Post by geophile »

codeulike wrote: post #13
geophile wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I assume that you are attempting sarcasm here, but I'm missing your point.

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

#44

Post by retrocryptid »

I love Snobol (and its descendent spitbol.) While an engineer at a large, unnamed company named after a river in South America, I was somewhat amazed by how "No computing problem was untouched by regular expressions" including scanning html. After many hilarious inter-team failures, we finally got approval to speak with our peers. I pointed out that HTML can't "really" be parsed with regexes (yes, I know, there are subsets of HTML that regexes work perfectly well with, but in this instance we did not control the input). Thus got a lot of blank looks. Then I mentioned "context free" versus "regular" and more blank looks. Someone in the back made a quip about not expecting a CS101 lecture at work.

Over the next two days I did a Mini-Course for a few engineers about why you may not want to use RegExes for everything. Spitbol played a leading role and those engineers walked away enlightened.

They were, of course, fired because they started asking other engineers in the company to modify their outputs so they could be parsed reliably with regexes. But that's okay, they went on to successful careers at other companies who provided decent health care options.

So... at least for a small number of engineers in Seattle, SNOBOL resulted in them getting decent health insurance.

I call that a win.

Also... I know half the people reading this will say something like "of course you can parse HTML with RegExes! I do it all the time!" -- I suggest you're parsing a subset of (x)(ht)(ml) and your code can easily get flummoxed with valid HTML, just not in the format you were used to. If you can recover from regex failures or modify the input to the regex so you don't get failures, more power to you! I'm not gonna argue with someone producing working code. The person who maintains your code after you leave may curse your name, however. But by that time your uber stock will be worth something and you'll be driving your bitcoin lambo to the beach every day so what do you care?

Anyway, SO had A LOT of discussion about RegExes and HTML:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6751105/why-its-not-poss...

"Alas, poor SNOBOL! I knew him, HN: a language of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me over the pains of regular languages a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in industry it is!"

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

#46

Post by retrocryptid »

pjungwir wrote: post #35
rootbear wrote: post #11

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.)

Oh wow, I learned a little Icon in college as part of a class on different programming paradigms. As soon as I saw the thread title I thought, "That sounds a lot like Icon." We also covered Scheme, Prolog, and . . . Java. :-) Okay this was the 90s when OO was new, but still maybe they should have gone with something like Smalltalk.

Oh man. Smalltalk has a huge learning curve. Of course, once you master a few dozen concepts you can just crank out the applications.

I once was paid real money to develop in VA Smalltalk. It was a fun language. Dave Ungar and Dan Ingalls said a few things that made me think they planned at one point to add spitbol-esque features to Smalltalk. And Alan Kay once quipped something about wishing he had seen scheme before writing smalltalk grammar.

For better or worse, bits of Smalltalk live on in Java and Ruby and bits of Scheme can be found in JavaScript if you look hard enough. Where did Icon and Spit/Sno-bol wind up? Alas.

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

#48

Post by AlbertCory »

KineticLensman wrote: post #41
AlbertCory wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It had nothing whatever to do with COBOL Except for the name, which IIRC was an intentional dig at an early COBOL standard that defined how you pronounced 'COBOL'. 'SNOBOL' can sound like 'snow-ball', analogous to a US accent where COBOL can be pronounced 'CO-ball'. [Edit] I used SNOBOL briefly in the 80s at Uni. It was one of the first 'odd' languages we were introduced to after Pascal, along with APL.

Americans wouldn't say "Uni" so I assume you're from the UK.

By "US accent" do you mean that "COBOL" would be pronounced "snowball" in the UK? That's really news to me.

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

#49

Post by rootbear »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #31
rootbear wrote: post #11

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.)

> I had a little trouble installing it on our Gould minicomputer and mailed in a support request Not sure if this means snail mail, but I don't know why I never considered that before email, people used physical mail for things like tech support, heck, maybe submitting patches

I meant email, which is generally my default meaning for "mail". I could have worded it better...
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