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⬐ feelin_googley

The first language I encountered that used associative arrays was Snobol. Today I still use Snobol4 and Spitbol. Despite Perl, Python, etc. Other than sed, I have never found another scripting language for text processing that was more effective than Snobol.

Bruce Barnett, co-author of UNIX Power Tools, on his website grymoire.com (highly recommended) states that the first language he encountered with associative arrays was AWK. (The K in AWK is Brian Kernighan, the man in this video.) At the conclusion of his AWK tutorial on grymoire.com Barnett recommends that readers should consider using Perl instead of AWK.

Snobol preceded AWK by about 10 years and Perl by about 20 years. Am I incorrect to assume that Snobol was the first language to use associative arrays?

Cheers.