This is just completely wrong. I learned and used SNOBOL for RBK Dewar's compiler classes at NYU, 78-79. (Dewar was one of the authors of SPITBOL, an implement

This is just completely wrong. I learned and used SNOBOL for RBK Dewar's compiler classes at NYU, 78-79. (Dewar was one of the authors of SPITBOL, an implementation of the language). Because of this, experience, a couple of years later, in grad school elsewhere, I was able to help someone in the computing center debug a client's SNOBOL program. Sure, this wasn't a huge insurance company writing their payroll system, but SNOBOL was a real language. But ignoring that: SNOBOL was a completely unique language, beautiful in its own way. It looked like a very sparse form of assembler language. Control flow was bizarre: a statement could "succeed" or "fail", and a statement could specify goto targets for either, both, or none of these cases. (I don't know the exact dates, but SNOBOL must have been designed around the same time as the famous "Goto considered harmful" letter.) As a measure of how good the language was: SNOBOL is famously based on the idea of string pattern matching. I found SNOBOL completely intuitive and easy to use. By contrast, I find UNIX regular expressions incomprehensible, and they send me to RTFM each time I use them. I have a similar view of Perl. Ugly and unintuitive, the exact opposite of SNOBOL. Also, I would like to recommend the Griswold, Poage, and Polonski book on SNOBOL4. I remember it as a truly excellent language book, on the level of K&R.