Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com