Phoenix.pm: Re: SNOBOL

Scott Walters scott at illogics.org
Fri Apr 23 13:42:21 CDT 2004


SNOBOL is pretty unusual as far as language syntax goes. You
can't get far without a good tutorial, but given a good tutorial,
it is easy to pick up. 

http://www.snobol4.com and http://www.snobol4.org have a tutorial
between the two of them somewhere, I'm sure, and snobol4.org
has the C-MAINBOL implementation of SNOBOL4 in portable C for
Unix up for download.

I haven't used anything but the POSIX version ;) I'm just kind of
an amature history buff, like a lot of people... and I happened to have
discovered SNOBOL before I discovered Perl. Comes of spending too
much time in libraries...

I got in on the whole computing deal when Commodore 64's and Apple II's
and Atari's were big. Used to bounce off a VAXes that had guest logins
through terminal servers that would let you connect anywhere in a 
University campus and connect directly to MUDs, all by 2400 baud modem.
I was on the net 3 or 4 years before I had an email account and probably 5 
years before I had my own email account ;) Back then, if you wanted
to look at an image, you had to zmodem it down (or xmodem, or kermit),
and then you sat there for an hour, unable to do anything else with
the computer or the connection as it came down, then you'd save it,
shell out of the terminal software, and run an image viewer on it
and render it in 16 colors at 160 by 200 pixels. So I often feel old
but I feel a little less old when someone else out-olds me ;)

I replied to my earlier message...

Cheers,
-scott

On  0, Victor Odhner <vodhner at cox.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi, Scott.
> 
> We had SNOBOL at Honeywell (uncer GCOS) back in 1985 but
> I never managed to grok it.  I was also trying lisp, etc.
> at that time.  Perl is everything I was looking for
> back then.
> 
> So:  Why don't you re-post that SNOBOL code
> with equivalent Perl?
> 
> Vic
> 



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