Re: XSLT is a pattern-action language. So is AWK. What

First one I came across, back in the early 70s, was SNOBOL - but I never used
it in anger.

There was a system that was popular in the 70s in the UK called FILETAB - the
basic idea being "decision tables", where you write a spreadsheet with
conditions on one axis and actions on the other. I discovered a few years ago
that there was a company with a large share of the market for doing
comparative auto insurance quotes in the UK whose core engine was all written
as an enormous set of FILETAB rules. They were running it on an emulated
PDP-11 because that's what it originally ran on in the days when the customers
were insurance brokers rather than the online public, and they couldn't find
any other technology to replace it that would deliver the required throughput.
(I got involved because they were -- and probably still are -- using XSLT
extensively for data conversions to get the data feeds from the insurance
companies into their core engine).

Michael Kay

> On 11 Dec 2024, at 10:58, Roger L Costello costello@xxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> I love programming languages that offer this style of programming: "if the
input matches this pattern, then do that action." That is, I love
pattern-action languages.
>
> XSLT is a pattern-action language. So is AWK.
>
> What other languages are pattern-action?
>
> /Roger