[1n3nt0r]

Nice to hear mention of RBK Dewar. He was well known in the programming languages field as a professor at NYU, but also was quite successful as an entrepreneur with his various compilers (I think his company was called "Realia").

I took one of his classes as an undergraduate at NYU, but used SNOBOL, SETL, and some other early languages as part of a young scholars high school program at NYU in the early 80s.

[geophile]

I remember SETL, and it made a huge impression on me -- just the idea of sets as a primitive datatype. I remember one lecture on using SETL to specify language optimizations, which were set-oriented.

Also, that experience primed me for appreciating the relational model, and relational algebra, and I went on to specialize in DBMSs.