While I don't remember enough Snobol to say, in Icon every expression may participate in the pattern-matching search process. For example, `a < b` doesn't produ

While I don't remember enough Snobol to say, in Icon every expression may participate in the pattern-matching search process. For example, `a < b` doesn't produce a boolean value, it either fails (cutting off the current branch of the search) or succeeds (producing b's value as its value, so you can write `a < b < c` with the conventional meaning without any special handling of that form of comparison). That's the kind of way that patterns are more deeply baked into these languages.