By geophile
I was thinking about why I liked SNOBOL4/SPITBOL so much. The bizarre syntax and control structures appealed to me for some reason. If you haven’t used the language, each statement can succeed or fail. At the end of the statement, you can optionally specify a goto target for success and for failure. There are no higher level control structures that I remember (except for functions), so indenting is not something you (OK, I) normally did. This resulted in very clean looking source code, for some reason. I just remember that impression very strongly. But that doesn’t really explain the appeal completely.
The string processing is fantastic — extremely powerful. I think regexes have a lot of the same power, but I always found SNOBOL4 more readable after the fact, when I had to go back and read and fix my own code. But that’s not it either.
I think the main reason I liked SNOBOL4 so much was that it was the first dynamic language I used. Values have types, variables do not. That was a big revelation. I don’t think I actually exploited it very often, but it was a cool new idea. And the absence of type declarations also contributed to the sense that the code looked clean. Automatic memory management was also very nice. I had spent a lot of time dealing with memory management in C. I must have in Pascal also. And I really don’t remember what Algol-W did for memory management — a free or delete statement maybe? And of course in FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC, there was no dynamically allocated memory at all, so you had to guess high, keep track, etc. Not having to worry about tracking memory was a nice change.
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