Going deep into the shed, SNOBOL was an early homoiconic language where the primary idiom was pattern-matching over strings. A little like regular expressions with control over backtracking, side effects during pattern matching, and many other features. SNOBOL provided a very unique paradigm in its day, and I can attest that "Thinking in SNOBOL" required letting go of almost everything FORTRAN taught you about programming :-)
The first implementation actually compiled SNOBOL programs into FORTRAN programs. My mind boggles at the thought.
The first implementation actually compiled SNOBOL programs into FORTRAN programs. My mind boggles at the thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL