more on snobol & java

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Shoch <shoch () alloyventures com>
Date: July 25, 2006 7:53:48 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Cc: John Shoch <shoch () alloyventures com>
Subject: RE: [IP] snobol & java

Dave,

Now this is a trip down memory lane....

--I first encountered Snobol in a course on "Non-Numerical Methods"  
taught at Stanford by Alan Kay and Gio Wiederhold, around 1971.  [Is  
that really 35 years ago?!]  It was running in batch mode on a 360/67.
--I remember I was confused for a little while, until I figured out  
that (unlike other langauges) there was no EXPLICIT operator for  
concatenating two strings -- you just wrote them next to each other.
--For the take-home exam at the end you could pick one of 3 problems,  
one of which was a Snobol project.  As I recall, I struggled with it,  
finally figuring out that it could not be done -- to answer the  
particular question you needed to observe some internal state of the  
pattern-matching system, which was not available.  With some  
trepidation I went to see Alan:  "I've worked on this pretty hard,  
but I don't think it can be done...."  He looked up and said  
something like, "Oh, I haven't even tried it...."  After about 5  
minutes of explanation he agreed, told me I'd done enough work, and  
said, "What are you doing this summer?  Xerox is opening a research  
center here in Palo Alto...."  I went for the summer, and stayed 14  
years.

Cheers,

John Shoch
Alloy Ventures

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 4:23 PM
To: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: [IP] snobol & java




Begin forwarded message:

From: Tim Bond <twwbond () gmail com>
Date: July 25, 2006 7:02:09 PM EDT
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: snobol & java

Dave,

Was going to send this to IP, and feel free to forward.

I remember "experiencing" a month of Snobol in the fall of 1984 as
part of my CS Intro to programming languages class at RPI . . .

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2006/jw-0724-funandgames-
p2.html

-- Tim


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