goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) (03/16/90)
In article <EMV.90Mar15140236@duby.math.lsa.umich.edu> Edward Vielmetti writes: > >...I haven't seen a snobol free, though there's Icon, check out >cs.arizona.edu for that (should be a good lead). This is correct. Connect to cs.arizona.edu, cd to /icon, and ftp the sources for version 7.5 (do not grab a pre-release copy of v8). There are binaries for MS-DOS and several other micros, and for Xenix as well. The source is there too, with configuration files for many, many Unix variants. I'm not connected with the Icon project in any way, but whenever I see questions about Snobol, I always feel the need to point out that Icon is the successor language to Snobol. It has a modern, procedural syn- tax, and a full set of data types and structures. It also offers such things as automatic type conversions (very, very convenient), garbage collection, built in hash tables, and integrates goal directed evalu- ation into the language as a whole much better than was the case with Snobol (there it is part of the restricted string-scanning "sublanguage"). Programs written in Icon are easy to maintain, and fairly easy to debug. It is especially good for symbolic manipulation, natural language pro- cessing, and in fact just about anything that does not require close in- teraction with a particular operating system (the idea is portability). Everyone with ftp access should have a copy around (kinda like having perl and tex). -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet goer@sophist.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer