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I took a class on programming languages from Douglas Maurer, who had written a book on SNOBOL. It was out of print, which saved a few dollars for the students, since he provided photocopies. SNOBOL did not look especially practical, but the built-in pattern matching made Awk and Perl that much easier to learn.

(Maurer also composes or composed music. His madrigal "Forty Bucks" set to music the text of a Montgomery County, Maryland, photo enforcement ticket.)

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Thank you! I took a programming languages survey course when getting my Masters at GWU in the early 90s. It was taught by Dr. Maurer. I couldn’t remember his name, but I did remember that he was into SNOBOL. I really need to find his “Forty Bucks” madrigal.

It was performed by an amateur theatre group called "The Hexagon Club", at a show maybe a dozen years ago. I've searched on-line without luck--it probably doesn't help that Tom T. Hall wrote a song called "The Ballad of Forty Dollars". Anyway, good luck.

We quite possibly crossed paths at GWU back then.

SNOBOL was the first language I learned with pattern matching. It was, at least to my memory, pretty much the main interesting feature of the language.

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