Going deep into the shed, SNOBOL was an early homoiconic language where the primary idiom was pattern-matching over strings. A little like regular expressions w

Going deep into the shed, SNOBOL was an early homoiconic language where the primary idiom was pattern-matching over strings. A little like regular expressions with control over backtracking, side effects during pattern matching, and many other features. SNOBOL provided a very unique paradigm in its day, and I can attest that "Thinking in SNOBOL" required letting go of almost everything FORTRAN taught you about programming :-) The first implementation actually compiled SNOBOL programs into FORTRAN programs. My mind boggles at the thought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL