in reply to New programming language suggestions

Back in college around, oh, '90, I took a class on the Icon programming language. For me at the time, it was quite eye opening that a language could be so powerful yet not very verbose. I'd been mainly doing C upto that point. So, I think it is very probable that my introduction to Icon was somewhat responsible for my getting sucked into perl as quickly and as fully as I did.

So, I'm not sure if it is different enough from C or perl as you would like, but it was partially derived from the above mentioned SNOBOL, so although it looks similar (to c and perl), I think it has enough differences that you might at least find it interesting.

-Scott

Update: made it more clear as to what Icon looked similar to.

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Re^2: New programming language suggestions
by samizdat (Vicar) on Sep 14, 2005 at 15:46 UTC
    Icon was Ralph Griswold's next crack at a language after SNOBOL5. He was a prof at U of Arizona when I was there and one of his students was the teacher of a comparative languages course and he threw SNOBOL at us. I was a frosh and this was a 272 course, but comparing Pascal to LISP to APL to SNOBOL to CDC6400 assembler was awesome. Quite the brain-stretcher, it {SNOBOL} was all about pattern matching. Many functional and logic programming languages take elements from SNOBOL, as do RegEx engines.
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      comparing Pascal to LISP to APL to SNOBOL to CDC6400 assembler was awesome

      Has a similar 200 level course at my undergrad. The year I took it was quite good. A couple of years afterwords, a new prof took over the course, and to limit the amount of year to year code reuse (ahem), he mixed up the program assignment and the language. For example, instead of coding the missionary and cannibal program in Lisp, he had them do it in Snobol. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth :-|

      --MidLifeXis

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