[IP] more on snobol & java
Begin forwarded message:
From: John Shoch <shoch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 25, 2006 7:53:48 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: John Shoch <shoch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 4:23 PM
To: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [IP] snobol & java
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tim Bond <twwbond@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 25, 2006 7:02:09 PM EDT
To: farber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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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