TIL that SCCS was originally programmed in SNOBOL on OS/360 which explains a lot.
SNOBOL was originally named SEXI; that got changed pretty quickly.
It's an odd language but it solved the nested parens problem that regexes can't deal with.
@arclight snobol is cool
@hipsterelectron I need to do something with it if only to justify the books I have on it.
Aug 20, 2026, 8:41 PMIma need to borrow those books sometime.
Aug 20, 2026, 8:42 PM@atax1a @rk Yes - here's the 50 year retrospective on SCCS https://mrochkind.com/mrochkind/docs/A_Retrospective_on_the_Source_Code_Control_System.pdf
At some point SCCS was ported from the IBM to UNIX which involved it being rewritten in C. Ironically the SNOBOL version seems to be lost to time...
Aug 20, 2026, 10:17 PM
@arclight @mjd @fanf SNOBOL's successor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)
Aug 21, 2026, 6:02 AM@arclight funny, I thought about a fresh implementation of sccs the other day, starting from just the POSIX utility descriptions