gistfile1.txt

Now I'll take the liberty of adding my own tuppence (since I'm writing
from the other side of the Ocean I'll use an English idiom...). I am a
loyal and grateful user of CSNOBOL, and I belong to those users
(probably a tiny minority, but minorities are highly fashionable these
times) who are no professional programmers. I am a philologist, and the
combination of [C|]S*BOL and bash scripts solves about 100% of my
programming needs -- plus some TCL/TK when some graphics is required. I
also use Prolog for syntax issues. I study one new computer language
every summer, when I am free from lectures, so I came to know, after *C*
that I studied 20 years ago, Prolog, Perl, Icon, and Python. I even gave
a seminar on Prolog (twice) and on Python with its powerful NLTK
(Natural Language Toolkit). But let me say that while students are
normally frightened of Perl, and they like Prolog at first (to discover
that trivial tasks are so difficult to deal with), and they find that
the NLTK has basically an English-only approach, they like Snobol
because its syntax is so "natural".

An example. They are the "Google-generation", and so the AND/OR approach
of the "alternative statements" is even more natural for them than the
classical IF/THEN/ELSE. When I learnt the alternative statements I was
basically "translating" from IF/THEN/ELSE, but they never do so. The
only student this year who was thinking in this way was a student whose
high school curriculum was not classical or linguistic, but technical.
He had 5 yrs of C programming at school and the alternative statement
was difficult to grasp -- for the others it was simple: "Ah, it's as as
googling. Easy!".

I just signed a Publishing Agreement for a textbook: one of the chapters
(about 50 pages) is an introduction to Snobol, the first in Italian and
I believe the first in many years written by a humanist -- after the
memorable contributions of Eric Johnson and Burkhard Meissner
(incidentally: the links provided at http://www.snobol4.org/ by Phil B.
seem to be dead).

Thank you very much! and keep the good work.

guido m

--
Guido Milanese