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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.
by 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 agohttps://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 agoMUMPS - that was it. The Sendmail-config of the healthcare industry.
- gompertz 5y agoIndeed 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!