5 ms·

Was a little shocked not to see any mention of Snobol4 in this article. Fantastic language, that really does not resemble any other languages and is a category

Was a little shocked not to see any mention of Snobol4 in this article. Fantastic language, that really does not resemble any other languages and is a category of its own. The syntax is pretty dated but I still use it today.

watersb 5y ago
Close friend in college managed to do a lot of Snobol4; I got the impression that it was a language based around string transformations, like regex everywhere. Mathematica is essentially a transformation engine like that.. A standard Lisp unification engine, initially. And didn't Snobol lead to some language that's embedded in large healthcare management systems?
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps makes unflattering comparisons to both FORTRAN and SNOBOL, but it sounds like its own special hell.
  - watersb 5y ago
    MUMPS - that was it. The Sendmail-config of the healthcare industry.
- gompertz 5y ago
  Indeed the primary usage was text and string manipulation; it had a huge following in the 70s and 80s in the humanities. However, like with most languages, all the bases are covered for complex functions, mathematics, etc; it just never got as much traction in those spaces. Far as I know it was the first language to use associative-arrays, it also supports backtracking (like prolog), and meta-programming (code generation during runtime), map functions, lambda like functions, etc. It really had it all!
edrx 5y ago
Are there any free implementations of Snobol4 available? Every couple of years I search for them again and I only find broken links... (Btw, Icon - Snobol4's successor - was my favorite language for several years. When I tried to learn Snobol4 by myself in the university I couldn't understand its semantics, but the book "The Icon Programming Language" was superbly written and it explained generators and backtracking very well).

watersb 5y ago

Close friend in college managed to do a lot of Snobol4; I got the impression that it was a language based around string transformations, like regex everywhere. Mathematica is essentially a transformation engine like that.. A standard Lisp unification engine, initially. And didn't Snobol lead to some language that's embedded in large healthcare management systems?

erik_seaberg 5y ago
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps makes unflattering comparisons to both FORTRAN and SNOBOL, but it sounds like its own special hell.
- watersb 5y ago
  MUMPS - that was it. The Sendmail-config of the healthcare industry.
gompertz 5y ago
Indeed the primary usage was text and string manipulation; it had a huge following in the 70s and 80s in the humanities. However, like with most languages, all the bases are covered for complex functions, mathematics, etc; it just never got as much traction in those spaces. Far as I know it was the first language to use associative-arrays, it also supports backtracking (like prolog), and meta-programming (code generation during runtime), map functions, lambda like functions, etc. It really had it all!

edrx 5y ago

Are there any free implementations of Snobol4 available? Every couple of years I search for them again and I only find broken links... (Btw, Icon - Snobol4's successor - was my favorite language for several years. When I tried to learn Snobol4 by myself in the university I couldn't understand its semantics, but the book "The Icon Programming Language" was superbly written and it explained generators and backtracking very well).