Re: gnat.spitbol.patterns.match(...)

[sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de (Georg Bauhaus)]

Ted Dennison (dennison@telepath.com) wrote:

: Well...a lot of that was SPITBOL (a regular expression language).

Not beeing the one to judge SNOBOL4, but still having
intense looks at it (and using it), thus finding "a regular
expression language" rather misleading (for reasons in
addition to those Robert Dewar has already given), here is
a quote from J. Gimpel, Algorithms in SNOBOL4:

"The SNOBOL series of programming languages through SNOBOL4 had only one
datatype, the string. Even the arithmetic facilities of SNOBOL3 were
implemented as operations on strings of digits rather than on machine
integers. Because of this historical bias, and because the language is
extaordinarily rich in string handling, SNOBOL4 is still regarded by
some as exclusively a string language. Yet, all the basic facilities
which one expects in a list processing language have been incorporated
into SNOBOL4; these include the automatic allocation and freeing of
storage, recursive functions, the pointer, and the data structure.
Moreover, the notation is, for the most part, conventional, convenient
and flexible. Were SNOBOL4 suddenly stripped of all its pattern
matching capabilities, it would still be a powerful and convenient
list-processing language." (p. 80)

And easy enough to use! :-)  With the GNAT library,
and the ./examples directory, you get Ada with it's
facilities combined with some from SNOBOL4, to make a
handy toolset for, e.g. data preparation (called "data laundry",
I believe, think of CGI as one example). 
NOte that Ada has types, so SNOBOL4's dodn't
have to be "imported" :>.  IMHO