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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I have never looked at SNOBOL code before. I had heard of it because the arcade game TRON had a SNOBOL level (in addition to levels: FORTRAN, BASIC, etc.).

I had also not seen the Eliza code before. Very fun.

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Both SNOBOL and its spiritual successor Icon did some interesting things with control flow.

That brings me back! One of my profs had us use Unicon, an extension of Icon that he designed.

I was always fascinated by that whole lineage Snobol -> Icon -> Unicon. I seem to remember one of the members (Icon?) is in "7 languages in 7 weeks." I'm sorry not to see them take off, although the recent flood of stories on Prolog (two of them!) makes me wonder if we might see the revival of Icon one of these days.

(Is Rebol related, or am I just free-associating languages with interesting control structures?)

Pragprog just published a new book this month with SNOBOL in it:

Seven Obscure Languages in Seven Weeks

https://pragprog.com/titles/dzseven/seven-obscure-languages-...

Huh, interesting! The introduction is explicit that it is considering old languages, but somehow I'd thought that occam was comparatively recent—at least, 21st-century. Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language)) tells me it isn't so, though.

Icon is a very cool language. Everything is a generator.

Neither have I, and this has gotten me excited solely because of that. I had heard SNOBOL's name back in the 80's a lot, along with COMAL, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, etc. This looks like a hybrid between COBOL and FORTRAN :)

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