[HN Gopher] Eliza in SNOBOL4
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Eliza in SNOBOL4
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-10-19 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I have never looked at SNOBOL code before. I had heard of it
| because the arcade game _TRON_ had a SNOBOL level (in addition to
| levels: FORTRAN, BASIC, etc.).
|
| I had also not seen the _Eliza_ code before. Very fun.
| sedatk wrote:
| Neither have I, and this has gotten me excited solely because
| of that. I had heard SNOBOL's name back in the 80's a lot,
| along with COMAL, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, etc. This looks like a
| hybrid between COBOL and FORTRAN :)
| mhd wrote:
| Both SNOBOL and its spiritual successor Icon did some
| interesting things with control flow.
| stvltvs wrote:
| That brings me back! One of my profs had us use Unicon, an
| extension of Icon that he designed.
| JadeNB wrote:
| 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?)
| __jonas wrote:
| The fact that one of the variables is named 'POST' makes some of
| this code read quite funny in todays context
| lysace wrote:
| Memories from when the majority of my programming
| information/influences (I was bbs/modem-less) in the early 90s
| came from this CD-ROM disc that I had purchased. It was from:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel
|
| The CD-ROM had this whole SNOBOL directory iirc. This CD-ROM was
| my entire world for like two years (until I got Internet access
| in 1995). I miss having oodles of time with zero pressure to do
| something that pays the bills.
|
| It was like having this gigantic curated dump of collected,
| sometimes quite old information from a connected world I had no
| access to. It felt so weird. Like discovering ancient alien
| civilizations, with no information on how to decipher it all.
|
| I think so many of us were so starved for information back then.
| tomcam wrote:
| I've wanted to see SNOBOL code in the wild for 40 years. Long
| time getting that itch scratched.
| gustavopezzi wrote:
| A couple of years ago I was lucky to teach a compiler class with
| Roberto Ierusalimschy from PUC-Rio, where we used a PEG parser
| for Lua called LPEG. That semester we spoke a lot about LPEG's
| implementation and that was very important for me to understand
| the original motivations for SNOBOL. I'm glad to see more
| examples of proper SNOBOL code in action. Thanks for the post.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| The original paper by Weizenbaum is a blast to read. The sample
| interaction with ELIZA is genuinely humorous. He also makes a
| number of observations that sound like precursors to societal
| issues today, such as how humans may perceive human-like
| machines, and whether it matters if humans can even recognize the
| non-humans among us.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365153.365168
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