🚀 go-pugleaf

Archive-name: icon/16-Mar-90
Original-posting-by: goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz)
Original-subject: Re: Snobol and APL for Unix
Archive-site: cs.arizona.edu [128.196.128.118]
Archive-directory: /icon
Reposted-by: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)

In article <EMV.90Mar15140236@duby.math.lsa.umich.edu> Edward Vielmetti writes:
>
>...I haven't seen a snobol free, though there's Icon, check out
>cs.arizona.edu for that (should be a good lead).

This is correct.  Connect to cs.arizona.edu, cd to /icon, and ftp the
sources for version 7.5 (do not grab a pre-release copy of v8).  There
are binaries for MS-DOS and several other micros, and for Xenix as well.
The source is there too, with configuration files for many, many Unix
variants.

I'm not connected with the Icon project in any way, but whenever I see
questions about Snobol, I always feel the need to point out that Icon
is the successor language to Snobol.  It has a modern, procedural syn-
tax, and a full set of data types and structures.  It also offers such
things as automatic type conversions (very, very convenient), garbage
collection, built in hash tables, and integrates goal directed evalu-
ation into the language as a whole much better than was the case with
Snobol (there it is part of the restricted string-scanning "sublanguage").
Programs written in Icon are easy to maintain, and fairly easy to debug.
It is especially good for symbolic manipulation, natural language pro-
cessing, and in fact just about anything that does not require close in-
teraction with a particular operating system (the idea is portability).

Everyone with ftp access should have a copy around (kinda like having
perl and tex).


   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@sophist.uchicago.edu         rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer