SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”) • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by joelrwilliams1 » Wed, May 03, 2023, 8:18 PM UTC

While studying Computer Science as an undergrad, I took a SNOBOL course (or maybe it one of the languages taught in a general coding course) ...either way, it was glorious. I love languages that are 'task-oriented'.

My all-time favorite was GPSS (General Purpose Simulation System) which would simulate transactions in a model...think of cars arriving from four directions at a traffic light. You could tweak the car arrival times and the length of red/green lights and get different outputs for 'wait time'.

I loved it so much, I asked my professor if there were good opportunities for a career using GPSS. He answered 'no' (LOL) and so I never pursued it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPSS

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

#52

Post by laurasia99 » Wed, May 03, 2023, 9:25 PM UTC

The paper "Implementing SNOBOL4 in SIL; version 3.11" by Griswold is interesting to look at (). It looks like there is some code at github (https://github.com/mdhender/sil/blob/main/v311.sil) but I haven't looked at the provenance of it.

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

#53

Post by jbottoms » Wed, May 03, 2023, 9:29 PM UTC

rashkov wrote: post #32

hello_computer wrote: post #7

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…

Oh wow, that's super impressive. Is there anything that comes to close this functionality today, outside of SNOBOL?

There were, and I kid you not, two simular languages; "SLUSHBOL" and "SPITBOL". But they are lost for the ages. Edit: I see that SPITBOL has been observed. No word on SLUSHBOL.

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

#54

Post by AlbertCory » Wed, May 03, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #48

KineticLensman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

too late to edit, but what I meant was "so-ball" (as opposed to "ko-ball")

I thought I knew almost all the differences between US & UK English, but this would be a new one on me, if true.

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

#55

Post by DerekL » Thu, May 04, 2023, 12:05 AM UTC

defaultcompany wrote: post #39

The SNOBOL4 language translator was still written in assembly language. However the macro features of the assembler were used to define the virtual machine instructions of the SNOBOL Implementation Language, the SIL Was SIL the inspiration for ZIL (Zork Implementation Language) which was also a virtual machine and allowed Infocom to release their text adventures on so many home computer platforms at once in the 80s?

I don't think so. As far as I know, ZIL was a variant of Lisp.

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

#56

Post by KineticLensman » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:36 AM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #48

KineticLensman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the accents here were exaggerated for comedic effect. You are a right, I’m a Brit and would personally pronounce the ‘BOL’ to sound like ‘doll’ rather than ‘ball’. Unfortunately I can’t now find a reference to the original standards

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

#57

Post by pjmlp » Thu, May 04, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

retrocryptid wrote: post #46

pjungwir wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befor…

Also Objective-C, although they could have done better than @ and[] all over the place.

And .NET/C#, as Java nemesis :)

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

#58

Post by kjs3 » Thu, May 04, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

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

We would physically mail 9-track tapes back and forth all the time. If you wanted, say, the BSD 4.2 Unix distribution, that was more efficient than downloading it over a 56kbps DDS line or some such.