The case for BUFFERS in SNOBOL4
Steven G. Duff · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1982
Two articles have appeared recently in SIGPLAN Notices describing the "Great Big Substitution Problem" of SNOBOL4 pattern matching [BLAT80, SCHI81]. Although the proposals in these papers are different, they both suggest the addition of new operators to the language to solve the problem. The purpose of this paper is to show that the Great Big Substitution Problem is embedded in a problem of a more pervasive nature, and to suggest a correspondingly more general solution.