Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.

On 4/16/2024 8:04 PM, Paul Rubin wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

Had a quick look at that. I would say the whole SNOBOL family has been
left in the dust by Perl.

 SNOBOL/SPITBOL in the 1970s were sort of like Perl in the 1990s, I
think.  But, they are mostly of historical interest now.  I think by the
time Spitbol ran on anything resembling a personal computer or
workstation, it was already history.  It ran on old mainframe OS's and
there wasn't much overlap.

FYI Lisp 2 (discussed in this thread) included a copy of Warren Teitelman's dissertation project - a data match and manipulate engine. It was called Flip or something simple but I don't remember. He spent a summer in Santa Monica converting it to Lisp2. Fred Blair from IBM Yorktown Heights was there the same summer and worked on importing Scratchpad to our Lisp too. There was a development, Formula Algol, that did a similar embedding into Algol so there was a lot of interest in the 1960s of including some sort of pattern match and reconstruction primitives into programming languages.
This stuff simply exacerbated our limited memory problems on old machines not matter how interesting they/it might be.
--
Jeff Barnett