I never did any COBOL but did some work with Pascal, Forth, and SNOBOL which are from that era. Of those, SNOBOL quickly faded but the others are still around. SNOBOL was a text processing ...

You can see a video about Eve, below. Neither of these are totally new ideas. SNOBOL, AWK, and Prolog all have some pattern-matching involved. [Donald Knuth] was promoting literate programming ...