Re: text processing as *the* problem

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <address@hidden>]

   X-Sender: dan@pop.sidhe.org
   Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 14:56:56 -0500
   To: "KELLEHER,KEVIN (Non-HP-Roseville,ex1)" <kevin_kelleher@non.hp.com>, 
"'ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu'" <ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu>
   From: Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org>
   Subject: Re: text processing as *the* problem
   
   At 11:42 AM 11/28/2001 -0800, KELLEHER,KEVIN (Non-HP-Roseville,ex1) wrote:
   >Are there any languages, even big languages, that were *built* with
   >text processing in mind?  Are there approaches that are not limited
   >to an implementation of regular-expression matching?
   
   Well, there's always SNOBOL... I'm not sure what there is past 
   regexes--they're pretty much the next logical step past state-machinish 
things.

Well, one obvious step past regexes is parenthesis-balanced
strings, which in general cannot be represented by regexes.
Small surprise that SNOBOL had a built-in primitive for
matching a parenthesis-balanced string.  Once you have that,
you have Lisp (sort of); you can build string patterns that
will take CAR and CDR.  Regexes alone don't quite get you there.

--Guy