SNOBOL !

[benali72]

Does anyone remember SNOBOL?  It was for text processing before text processing became routine. From the 1960s. What a goofy, unstructured, but very fun-cool language it was. Of course you can download it for free for your PC these days.

[Richardk]

Does anyone remember SNOBOL?

Yes. Did some coding in it but even back then it wasn't very common.

[Origisaurus]

Did some serious coding in the late 60s - early 70s.  Mostly superseded by grep and awk on unix.  Pattern matching superb. 

Really like the /S label1/F label2.   "If this then that else the other."

Hard to grok.  And really powerful, once grokked.

[pxsant]

Somewhere in a closet I think I still have Snobol on a paper tape that was never opened.   I also have the manual with it.  Have to dig them out.

[Walter Mitty]

I remember reading about SNOBOL back in the day, but I never got exposed to a machine that had it.

The closest I ever got to text processing in the 1960s was TECO macros. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Editor_and_Corrector

You could do some amazing things with TECO macros.  Eventually, somebody wrote a standard set of Editing MACroS that became known as EMACS. 

After that, my interest in text editors waned.  When I cut over to the VAX they had two editors.  I went with the simpler one, whose name I forget.  It was your basic WYSIWYG, with a few global replacement commands.  It worked well with the VT100 terminal.  The other editor, called VAXTPU was a "text processing utility",  a true string oriented programming tool.  VAXTPU is one of many things I put off learning until it was too late.

I've been going downhill with text editors for the last 25 years.  Now, my speed is just about Notepad.  About the  only time I use a better editor is if there's one built into an IDE.  Text editors that know the programming language and are opinionated about prettyprinting save me some work. 

And, of course, there's always word processors.

[benali72]

SNOBOL was a pretty hard language to work in.  The odd thing to me is that many current languages are pretty hard to work in too, when it comes to string processing. For example, Perl uses regular expressions for string processing -- super-powerful but every bit as hard as SNOBOL (especially if you're working on someone else's code!).  I guess for modern languages I like function libraries for this (like C) or string objects (in the OO languages).

[Walter Mitty]

Regular expressions have been on my "gotta learn this someday" list for years. 

That list keeps getting longer and more cluttered all the time.  I figured that hwen I retired I'd have all the time in the world to learn things.  Hah!

[Richardk]

It's not that hard to learn enough to be 'dangerous' and that will probably get you by 99% of the time.

[Origisaurus]

It's not that hard to learn enough to be 'dangerous' and that will probably get you by 99% of the time.

True.  Most folks you meet never get to the 'dangerous' stage.  Which is a tremendous competitive advantage. 

[David Randolph]

Regular expressions have been on my "gotta learn this someday" list for years. 

Regular expressions are not that bad to write, but they are mostly "write only". It is almost impossible to properly document them. Thus, it is more challenging to debug them. If you look at the code that is used to execute them, it is a quite a bit larger than I had expected it to be.