Uglliness scale: Python <<< awk << p*** < SNOBOL4

[Tim Peters]

[Robin Becker]
> I once described perl as being like awk on steroids and lsd

[John Machin]
> Actually perl is more like SNOBOL4 on sedatives.

While I'm tickled by the image, nothing is like SNOBOL4 -- not even its
modern successor, Icon.  SNOBOL4 was unique, and is still the Best Language
on Earth for writing string pattern-matching algorithms.

> [a nostalgic look at S4's pioneering features]
> ...
> It even had the ability to assign the result of a partial pattern
> match to a variable ... about 30 years later, Python got this in
> the re module's ?P<name> feature, and AFAIK perl doesn't have this
> even yet.

Neither does Python <wink>:  S4's "immediate assignments" allowed capturing
partial results even if the overall match failed.  Perl may yet get the
effect of that by allowing embedded Perl code in regexps, but Python likely
won't.

> However SNOBOL4 also had the ugliest syntax that I've ever seen in a
> language that was genuinely intended for serious work -- Intercal is
> far uglier but is a parody.

Its syntax was fine!  I expect that what you really object to is the absence
of control structures other than goto, and the LT/GE/etc spelling of
comparison operators.  That was common enough in its day, and even by the
time Pascal came around the keypunch I used still didn't have a semicolon
key.  It looks ugly in retrospect only because it is <wink>.

> For example [1]
> 	FLIP = LEN(*I) . HEAD LEN(1) $ X LEN(1) $ Y *LGT(X,Y)

All obvious to the most casual observer <snort>.  It's interesting that you
*still* can't spell this algorithm fragment with comparable ease in Python
or Perl!  Roughly, FLIP is a pattern fragment that skips the first I
characters of a string (or fails if the string is shorter than I chars),
assigns the next two characters to variables X and Y (or fails if there
aren't two more), and then succeeds if X is lexically greater than Y else
fails.  And the first I characters are assigned to HEAD iff the pattern as a
whole succeeds.  In context, the next line is

     STR FLIP = HEAD Y X

which matches FLIP against string STR, and interchanges X with Y if they're
lexically out of order (replacing the HEAD characters with themselves
unchanged).  In Python you'd be provoked to

    def flip(str, i):
        try:
            if str[i] > str[i+1]:
                str = str[:i] + str[i+1] + str[i] + str[i+2:]
        except IndexError:
            pass
        return str

To modern eyes I'm sure that looks clearer, but six delicate indexing
expressions are a half dozen chances to blow it that the S4 fragment can't
suffer.  I will admit that the call-by-reference Perl

sub flip {
    my ($s, $i) = @_;
    substr($$s, $i, 2) = $2 . $1 if $$s =~ /^.{$i}(.)(.)/ && $1 gt $2;
}

is much closer to the S4 <wink>.

> ...
> Did-anyone-we-know-write-a-SNOBOL4-mode-for-the-IBM-026-keypunch?-ly
> yours,

yes-but-it-was-in-fortran2-and-kept-blowing-the-tubes-ly y'rs  - tim