Talk:SNOBOL
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Snobol and SNOBOL should be merged.
Agreed, but whoever does it has to consider two issues:
- Decide which one (Snobol, IMO) gets its nonredundant text moved into the other (this other being SNOBOL, IMO). History of the "losing" one should be preserved, IMO by Move This Page renaming it (Snobol, IMO) to something like Talk:SNOBOL/Snobol history before reducing Snobol to a redirect. (But Talk:SNOBOL/Snobol history should be linked to by Talk:SNOBOL, and the Snobol redirect should then be edited to point to SNOBOL) instead of Talk:SNOBOL/Snobol history.
- Nonredundant text from Snobol should preferably be IDed by someone familiar with the status of the SNOBOL language (or prepared to research) and smoothly grafted in.
Toward that end:
- i am using Move This Page to move this talk page to Talk:SNOBOL where it is more likely to be seen by the larger number of contributors to SNOBOL
- i'm adding "see also" links in both directions between SNOBOL and Snobol; they are hopefully temporary.
- Talk:Snobol should automagically get created as a brand new redirect to Talk:SNOBOL as part of the Move
- If that doesn't show results in say a month, someone should IMO try to contact some past contributors
- After say two months, i say just see to the history, then paste Snobol's current content at the foot of the SNOBOL page and let our interested colleagues take care of it as the spirit moves them.
I suggest all this, of course, in the spirit of editing boldly; i'm a new kid on the block, but getting bolder. --Jerzy 10:31, 2003 Oct 13 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Regarding the "jocular reference to COBOL"
This is possible, I guess... has anyone verified this with the creators of SNOBOL?
The story I heard (from Polonsky, as I recall, who I knew at Bell Labs), was that the name came from "a snowball's chance in hell," which was said (by whom I don't know) about the prospects for the language succeeding (or, perhaps, being implemented).
(by ?)
[edit] Regarding the original article
It is NOT accurate that languages like AWK and Perl are "more efficient". Notably, well-written programs compiled using the SPITBOL implementation (at least) of the SNOBOL4 programming language are often ten or more times faster in execution than a corresponding Perl program.
Also, while regular-expression-type pattern matching has undoubtedly been made POPULAR by Perl et al, it is a mind-numbingly braindead approach to pattern matching compared to the much richer and more powerful pattern matching capabilites offered by SNOBOL4 and SPITBOL.
Also, Ralph Griswold has stated that the original implementation of the SNOBOL programming language was implemented before the IBM 360, for the IBM 7090. (There is an ACM SNOBOL page from a 1981 ACM talk where Griswold talks about the creation of SNOBOL; ref. http://tennessee.cc.vt.edu/~hopl/Snobol_files/snobol.html )
Gep2 05:19, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] First Implementation
in the article is credited to the 360, but one of the references cited (http://www.snobol4.org/history.html) has the first implementation on the 7090.
- That seems like good enough reason to change it, so I will... Dpbsmith (talk) 16:40, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Added a link to Icon, which is a descandant language, Ranvaig 20:40, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] CleanUp Template
I am sure that this article could be improved—and if I can find my printout of the manual (DEC 20, SPITBOL or possibly Macro SPITBOL) and my copy of Susan Hockey’s book, and then switch my mind back by a couple of decades, I might even be able to contribute to that. (Sadly, I didn’t have the foresight to steal the computer centre’s copy of Griswold et al, which I am sure has not been used since. It struck me as a fine book.) In the meantime, however, I notice that whoever posted the template message failed to provide the indicated rationale on this talk page. That seems to me to be verging upon spam and I propose therefore to remove it. Any objections?
By the way, the key thing that seems to me to be missing in regexp, as opposed to SNOBOL, is not so much power as human-readability. Ian Spackman 02:34, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
- According to the SNOBOL wiki there is rather more to SNOBOL pattern matching. Not least, the ability to create pattern matching "functions" which can be used within new patterns. --24.205.91.162 18:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
