SNOBOL4 was earlier than AWK with associative arrays by a little under ten years. However, from the standpoint of manipulating strings with regular expressions, AWK introduced the concept as far as I know.
I did say "more or less" and "modern". Who's heard of SNOBOL4 now? :) My guess is that every other language that got AA's got them by way of influence from awk (or something else that got them from awk); awk itself may have gotten them from SNOBOL4 though.
But ok, we can at least say that awk is the oldest programming language to have associative arrays that's still in widespread use. (Yes, I'm hoping that someone will argue for SNOBOL4's current widespread use. :) )
> However, from the standpoint of manipulating strings with regular expressions, AWK introduced the concept as far as I know.
Two can play at this game! `awk` is really a successor of `sed`, which is all about manipulating strings with regular expressions. sed maybe isn't turing complete though (but someone's gonna prove me wrong here too) or at any rate not convenient to use in as general a way as awk.
> Christophe isn't the first person to realize that sed is almost a general purpose programming language. People have written tetris, sokoban and many other programs in sed.
Wow! But clearly, you wouldn't WANT to except for the fun of it.
I wouldn't want to :). It looks very expressive, much more than I had known just 3 days ago, but maybe it's a little loose around the edges for my taste.
Yep, I recommend Gimpel's old book Algorithms in SNOBOL4 for fun examples (from the days when such a title did not mean an undergrad data-structures-and-algorithms curriculum).
