Hello Bento! On Wed, 31 Jul 2024 15:19:53 -0300 Bento Borges Schirmer <bbschir...@inf.ufsm.br> wrote:
> I peeked around your repository. I noticed the hyperlinks to CSNOBOL4 > are broken. what about SNOBOL4? is it cool? I understand it acts as a > filter? I updated the links. It seems to live here nowadays: http://www.regressive.org/snobol4/csnobol4/ SNOBOL4 is a scripting language. A very old one. But it's still interesting and worthwhile to learn because of its unique built-in backtracking-based pattern matching language. Its descendant - Icon - is also worth checking out. On the downside, SNOBOL4 will torture you with its exclusive reliance on Gotos for control flow. A rarity nowadays, but this language is entirely "unstructured"! > and is this BNF built into SNOBOL4? No. I built a EBNF parser in SNOBOL4 that spits out GNU Pic code. That was back when I wrote my bachelor thesis. SNOBOL4 is good at prototyping small DSLs and compilers. > is it worth learning? or do you think other > languages/libraries/DSLs better solve the problems it was designed > for? If you have a fetish for old and obscure languages like I, it's certainly worthwhile to learn. ;-) > how do you even learn it, like is there some > tutorial, manual or exercises about it? There is lots of material on SNOBOL4 on the aforementioned website: http://www.regressive.org/snobol4/ The most important book is probably the "Green Book": http://www.math.bas.bg/bantchev/place/snobol/gpp-2ed.pdf > is it standardized, or are > there dozens of mutually exclusive dialects? Pretty much standardized. There are only two dialects left, that you could possibly run on a modern PC. That's CSNOBOL4 and SPITBOL. > is it compiled or interpreted? CSNOBOL4 is interpreted. But SPITBOL is actually a compiler - the first and oldest compiler for a loosely typed high-level scripting language AFAIK. (Mind you, this was before JIT-compilation...) > can I call it inside a C program as a subroutine? Not that I know. > can it call C functions? http://www.regressive.org/snobol4/csnobol4/curr/doc/snobol4ffi.3.html > > Also, please do share tricks, difficulties you faced, methodologies > and habits when writing your thesis in ms groff! I'm to follow similar > path some time. Mhh, better ask something more concrete. Use `pdfmom --roff` even with `-ms` (`-mspdf`) and gropdf (pdfmom does that by default). Other than that, be prepared to write quite a few custom macros. Be sure to check out Pic and Grap - it's so much fun to play around with. Both my bachelor and master thesis contained only code-generated graphics (not counting screenshots). Best regards, Robin
