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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!nsc!amdahl!rtech!roger
From: roger@rtech.UUCP (Roger Rohrbach)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Snobol and C (Awk!)
Message-ID: <807@rtech.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Dec-85 02:54:58 EST
Article-I.D.: rtech.807
Posted: Mon Dec 30 02:54:58 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 31-Dec-85 01:02:11 EST
References: <816@bu-cs.UUCP> <517@rdin.UUCP>
Organization: Relational Technology, Alameda CA
Lines: 18

> I always considered awk(1) to be a marriage of Snobol and C...
> I always thought that if they just put a little more work into it, they
> could develop awk into a real language...  Does anybody know why
> this wasn't done/shouldn't be done/can't be done?
> 
> Robert Perlberg

	If you pick up a copy of "The Icon Programming Language" by
R.E. & M.T. Griswold (published in 1983 by Prentice-Hall), you will
see that Snobol's powerful successor fits your bill (although it
resembles C less than awk does), providing awk's capabilities and
beyond in the context of a procedural language.  Somehow I suspect
that most C programmers will prefer this to a pattern-directed language
such as awk, because it at least appears to be more general  (Kind of
like Lisp vs. Prolog).

					Roger Rohrbach
					{ucb,dec}vax!mtxinu!rtech