I really don't understand the comparison you're trying to make. I learned SNOBOL from a university library book in the early 1980s, and used it on the universit

I really don't understand the comparison you're trying to make. I learned SNOBOL from a university library book in the early 1980s, and used it on the university mainframe - but it's baffling to me that someone might want to continue using it today for anything other than nostalgic reasons. (If you're trolling, good one!) There's an enormous amount of accidental/inessential complexity in the code you provided, and that's a big part of the reason no-one seriously uses SNOBOL or similarly primitive languages for anything serious today. Code like the above can't remotely scale to larger programs, and attempts to do so were notorious for their failure. Here's a version of FizzBuzz in e.g. Haskell: fizz n | n `mod` 15 == 0 = "FizzBuzz" | n `mod` 3 == 0 = "Fizz" | n `mod` 5 == 0 = "Buzz" | otherwise = show n mapM_ putStrLn $ map fizz [1..100] Even the already rather simple control flow is abstracted away by the 'map' function, so there are no visible loops or gotos. Compare that to your program with a dozen labels and seven gotos, where the actual logic is buried in irrelevant cruft. Even versions with more explicit control flow (i.e. without map) can be similarly readable, but if your goal is to minimize complex control flow, then rather than reverting to intractable gotos, go read "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO" (http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5753 http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5753), published in 1977, and learn to use functions for control flow.