David Wright wrote: ... > One of the most pleasurable times in my career was when our Research > Computing Advisor thrust a copy of the Green Book into my hands. > http://www.math.bas.bg/bantchev/place/snobol/gpp-2ed.pdf > After years of Fortran, this was my first experience of a designed > computer language, with dynamic allocation of memory, dynamic typing, > associative arrays, and its claim to fame, pattern matching. > > With over 40 years of language development since then, it's probably > difficult for anyone now to get quite the same buzz from meeting this > language. (BTW I was never a user of SNOBOL4 itself, but the compiled > version, SPITBOL, which was much faster, and available to me on IBM > OS/360 and its successors.) Its pattern matching was very ahead of > its time.
... yes that was one of languages we surveyed in the computer language class. :) much fun back then. same as lisp, algol, ada, smalltalk, etc. i think i still have the green book here someplace. time marches on and i've mostly retired from coding unless i can come up with something that catches my interest strongly enough to keep me busy through a winter. summertime i'm too busy gardening to put much time into anything significant. songbird
