How does that differ from a parser combinator library beyond that it's baked into the language? It took a few decades for other languages to catch up, but patterns being first-class objects that can be combined in various ways isn't that unusual. For example, in Lua with LPeg those examples would be:
full_name = first_name * last_name
old_school_name = last_name * P', ' * first_name
any_name = full_name + old_school_name
(* is sequence, + is or, P is a function that converts a string to a pattern)
While I don't remember enough Snobol to say, in Icon every expression may participate in the pattern-matching search process. For example, `a < b` doesn't produce a boolean value, it either fails (cutting off the current branch of the search) or succeeds (producing b's value as its value, so you can write `a < b < c` with the conventional meaning without any special handling of that form of comparison).
That's the kind of way that patterns are more deeply baked into these languages.
