Adventures in Technonecrophilia
I admit it. I love screwing around with dead programming languages.
So I was deep in the core of the target demographic for Jocelyn Paine’s essay on the joys of Snobol over at Dr. Dobb’s Code Talk. If cores are what target demographics have.
Snobol, if you are a little hazy about its virtues, is all about pattern matching. Jocelyn says he still prefers its pattern matching to Perl’s, and argues that Snobol patterns, being recursive, are inherently more powerful than Perl’s.
I love it that Snobol’s syntax is about half a step up from assembly language, but that it has the mutability of any modern programming language. Figuring out how to solve a problem in Snobol is like doing a puzzle, and discovering the power hidden in this ancient language is like winning a prize.
Shameless self-promotion: Follow my writing in PragPub, in Dr. Dobb’s, in MacTech magazine, or in my blog.