Re: classic "debates", rehash #9823758973458972389457098345787305897345987098374508932745087

From:

Lew <lew@lewscanon.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Fri, 22 May 2009 12:41:50 -0700 (PDT)

Message-ID:

<13cd29f7-d4c3-4846-b305-f22a0be75859@o20g2000vbh.googlegroups.com>

On May 22, 1:02 pm,
Lew wrote:

SNOBOL.

Tom Anderson <t...@urchin.earth.li> wrote:

Oh, now you're just being silly.

Not at all. SNOBOL was a fairly significant language in its own way.
Perhaps that's why it was included in the Computer Science classes I
took at university. Many things we think of as modern in computer
languages, such as garbage collection, were in SNOBOL early on.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL>

SNOBOL4 patterns, however, subsume BNF grammars,
which are equivalent to Context-free grammars and
more powerful than regular expressions.

....

SNOBOL4's programmer-defined data type facility was advanced at the time =

it is similar to the earlier Cobol's and the later Pascal's records.

....

All SNOBOL command lines are of the form
Label1 Subject Pattern = Object :(Goto Label2)

Can you spell "Perl"?

It is possible to implement a language interpreter in SNOBOL
almost directly from a Backus-Naur form expression of it, with few change=

s.
....

SNOBOL pattern-matching uses a backtracking algorithm similar to that
used in the logic programming language Prolog

....

SNOBOL stores strings in a garbage-collected heap.

--
Lew