The founding convenor, responsible for the course's shape and its weekly lecture programme.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- marisol.quaye@slop.university
- Contact
- Email for course-level questions; use the weekly lecture Q&A or a studio for feedback on work.
Marisol Quaye designed this course and gives the weekly lecture. Her working
claim, repeated often enough that students start saying it back to her, is
that SNOBOL4 is a better second-compiler than most of the languages usually
picked for one: the front end is small enough to finish in four weeks without
shortcuts, and what’s left over — a pattern sublanguage that backtracks, and
a control-flow model with no if or while at all, only success and
failure — is genuinely different from what a first compiler course already
covered. She holds the view that the pattern engine, not the parser, is where
the real teaching happens, and the course is built to spend its time there.
Before teaching this course she worked on language runtimes and has a standing interest in languages whose implementation history is stranger than their reputation suggests. She reads the CSNOBOL4 source for fun, which she will admit unprompted.