| well if my 2p are worth at least 2p to you, do it in ansi C if you want | anyone to use it. The advantages of portability and general | comprehensability outweigh some fun features that nonstandard extensions | may have. I like SNOBOL but I would avoid inflicting it on other people.
I'd prefer ansi C, mostly because it's the "least common denominator" language that can be most easily included in the other C dialects and the extensible languages like tcl, perl and python. Snobol's a fun language. It's too bad that it's so unknown outside of academia. I did a few projects with it back in the 70's, and since then, it's always been a real pain trying to use what passes for pattern matching in other languages. Even perl is so awkward and primitive in comparison. I mean, you can't even write a recursive pattern. But I suppose we'd never be able to get away with anything as useful as snobol for our implementation language here. ;-) I've tried to pick up icon a couple of times, but I was never too successful in getting it to run. Maybe I should look again. (I was also corrupted mentally by learning prolog. Now it seems that in every other project, there's some multi-month task where I keep thinking "This would be 10 minutes' work if I could just get the damned language to resolve a few expressions. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
