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I learned Snobol and then wrote a toy Forth


This page is a mini-site for my Snobol excursion with links to separate pages for my: - Thoughts on Snobol - Toy Forth interpreter written in Snobol - Thoughts about writing a toy Forth interpreter in Snobol On with the show… I finally learned SNOBOL! Snobol has been on my programming language bucket list for ages. Snobol Here’s my conclusions about the Snobol4 language itself, which get their own pages: In short, I think Snobol is fascinating.

No kidding: Every single line in a Snobol program consists of five parts: label, subject, pattern, replacement, goto. That certainly makes it a Weird Language to the modern developer, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to see why Snobol was once popular and well-regarded by computer users of all stripes. It’s extremely easy for seasoned developers to forget that even a simple loop construct is a conceptual leap for beginners.

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