bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) (12/17/85)
>From: abh6509@ritcv.UUCP (Xandrew) >In article <2433@hcradm.UUCP> steve@hcradm.UUCP (Steve Pozgaj) writes: >>Hey, c'mon people! Something very obvious has been missed here. Namely, >>the damn program should have been written in SNOBOL in the first place. >>You want to write operating systems, you use C; you want to match patterns, >>you use SNOBOL:-) >>-- >>Everyone's a SNOBOL freak at heart! It's only the brave who admit it. >How right you are! Now show us how to link a SNOBOL file into a C module...... Trivial, use a couple of pipes...(unless you think it would be faster to re-write all of Snobol's functionality in C.) -Barry Shein, Boston University
perl@rdin.UUCP (Robert Perlberg) (12/20/85)
I always considered awk(1) to be a marriage of Snobol and C. In fact,
the awk manual even mentions Snobol in describing its array features.
I always thought that if they just put a little more work into it, they
could develop awk into a real language that could call C routines and
vice versa but retained awk's pattern matching and string splitting and
string-indexed arrays and auto-type-conversion. Does anybody know why
this wasn't done/shouldn't be done/can't be done?
Robert Perlberg
Resource Dynamics Inc.
New York
{philabs|delftcc}!rdin!perlroger@rtech.UUCP (Roger Rohrbach) (12/30/85)
> I always considered awk(1) to be a marriage of Snobol and C... > I always thought that if they just put a little more work into it, they > could develop awk into a real language... Does anybody know why > this wasn't done/shouldn't be done/can't be done? > > Robert Perlberg If you pick up a copy of "The Icon Programming Language" by R.E. & M.T. Griswold (published in 1983 by Prentice-Hall), you will see that Snobol's powerful successor fits your bill (although it resembles C less than awk does), providing awk's capabilities and beyond in the context of a procedural language. Somehow I suspect that most C programmers will prefer this to a pattern-directed language such as awk, because it at least appears to be more general (Kind of like Lisp vs. Prolog). Roger Rohrbach {ucb,dec}vax!mtxinu!rtech
ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) (12/31/85)
> If you pick up a copy of "The Icon Programming Language" by > R.E. & M.T. Griswold (published in 1983 by Prentice-Hall), you will > see that Snobol's powerful successor fits your bill (although it > resembles C less than awk does), providing awk's capabilities and > beyond in the context of a procedural language. Somehow I suspect > that most C programmers will prefer this to a pattern-directed language > such as awk, because it at least appears to be more general (Kind of > like Lisp vs. Prolog). I have used both Snobol and Icon and prefer the former, once I can get around the crummy syntax. I am aware, though, that the problem may be that I learned Snobol first and have not yet had the incentive to steep myself in Icon lore. One nice thing about Icon -- it's free.