The concept certainly predates Haskell by a few decades, but I haven’t found the origin of the phrase. I tried to find a copy of this SNOBOL paper from 1973[0]

The concept certainly predates Haskell by a few decades, but I haven’t found the origin of the phrase. I tried to find a copy of this SNOBOL paper from 1973[0] to see whether it occurs there, but no luck so far. It doesn’t appear in the original COMIT paper[1]. [0]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361952.361960 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361952.361960 [1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/comit/comit-paper.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/comit/comit-paper.html