SnoPy 0.1 - SNOBOL pattern matching for Python

[Paul Rubin]

Don Rozenberg <rozen at mcn.org> writes:
> SNOBOL was a text processing language without equal that was
> developed at Bell Labs in the 1960's.  It has nearly died out but I
> am offering this extension as an alternative to regular expressions.
> In many respects, SNOBOL pattern matching is much more powerful yet
> easier to learn than regular expressions.

Wow, cool.  A lot of SNOBOL patterns can be transformed into regular
expressions.  However, a lot of them can't be.  Regular expressions
have caught on as a pattern language because they can be interpreted
very efficiently.  Completely general SNOBOL patterns can be extremely
slow to interpret.  When SNOBOL was invented, these things weren't
understood as well as they are now.

The successor to SNOBOL is called ICON: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon
Python draws some ideas from Icon and looking at Icon will probably
be interesting to Python fans, even if they don't take up programming in it.