SNOBOL (String Oriented Symbolic Language) is a computer programming language developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is the Research organization Implementation is the realization of an application or execution of a Plan, idea Model, Design, Specification, standard, Algorithm SPITBOL ( Sp eedy I mplemen' t' ation of SNO' BOL') is a compiled implementation of the SNOBOL4 language. Icon is a very high-level Programming language featuring goal directed execution and many facilities for managing strings and textual patterns A computer is a Machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. Before proposing a merge request please see Talk and see if the merger you propose has recently been made and Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is the Research organization David J Farber is a professor of Computer Science, noted for his major contributions to Programming languages and Computer networking. Ralph E Griswold ( 19 May 1934, Modesto, CA – 4 October 2006 Tucson, AZ) was a Computer scientist Polonsky. (The name is a jocular reference to COBOL and ALGOL, but these languages have no other connection and no other notable similarities). COBOL (ˈkoʊbɒl is one of the oldest programming languages still in active use Algol (β Per / Beta Persei known colloquially as the Demon Star, is a bright Star in the Constellation Perseus.

During the 1950s and 1960s there was a flourishing of interest in special-purpose computer languages. SNOBOL was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages, and one of the more successful; others included COMIT and TRAC. COMIT was the first string processing language (compare SNOBOL, TRAC, and Perl) developed on the IBM 700/7000 series computers by Dr TRAC (for T ext R eckoning A nd C ompiling is a Programming language developed in the early 1960s by Calvin Mooers (1919-1994

SNOBOL was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s as a text manipulation language in the humanities, but in recent years, its popularity has faded as newer languages such as Awk and Perl have made string manipulation by means of regular expressions popular; it is now mostly a special interest language used mainly by enthusiasts, and new implementations are rare. The humanities are academic disciplines which study the Human condition, using methods that are primarily Analytic, Critical, or Speculative AWK is a general purpose Programming language that is designed for processing text-based data either in files or data streams and was created at Bell Labs in the 1970s NOTES FOR EDITORS "Perl" is not an acronym (read the "Name" section below In Computing, regular expressions provide a concise and flexible means for identifying strings of text of interest such as particular characters words or patterns of characters

Features

The SNOBOL4 (StriNg Oriented symBOlic Language number 4) version is the fourth and final incarnation of such a series of special purpose programming languages for character string manipulation. SNOBOL ( String Oriented Symbolic Language) is a Computer Programming language developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories

The SNOBOL4 variant of the language supports a number of built-in data types, such as integers and limited precision real numbers, strings, patterns, arrays, and tables (associative arrays), and also allows the programmer to define additional data types and new functions. A data type in Programming languages is an attribute of a datum which tells the computer (and the programmer something about the kind of datum it is The integers (from the Latin integer, literally "untouched" hence "whole" the word entire comes from the same origin but via French In Mathematics, the real numbers may be described informally in several different ways In Computer programming and some branches of Mathematics, a string is an ordered Sequence of Symbols. In Computer science, pattern matching is the act of checking for the presence of the constituents of a given Pattern. In Computer science an array is a Data structure consisting of a group of elements that are accessed by indexing. An associative array (also associative container, map, mapping, hash, dictionary, finite map, and in query-processing an In Computer science, a subroutine ( function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger SNOBOL4's programmer-defined data type facility was advanced at the time (it preceded, and resembles, Pascal's "records" and C's "structs"). Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural Programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured

SNOBOL4 stands apart from the mainstream programming languages of that time by having patterns as a first-class data type (i. In Computing, a first-class object (also value, entity, and citizen) in the context of a particular Programming language, is an entity e. a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language) and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation. For concatenation of general lists see Append. In Computer programming, string concatenation is the operation of joining two character Strings generated during execution can be treated as programs and executed.

A SNOBOL pattern can be very simple or extremely complex. A simple pattern is just a text string (e. g. "ABCD"), but a complex pattern may be a large structure describing, for example, the complete grammar of a computer language.

SNOBOL provides the programmer with a rich assortment of features including some rather exotic ones. As a result it is possible to use SNOBOL as if it were an object-oriented language, a logical programming language, a functional language or a standard imperative language by changing the set of features used to write a program. Object-oriented programming (OOP is a Programming paradigm that uses " objects " and their interactions to design applications and computer programs Logic programming is in its broadest sense the use of mathematical logic for computer programming In Computer science, functional programming is a Programming paradigm that treats Computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and In Computer science, imperative programming is a Programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state It also concatenates strings that are simply placed next to each other in a statement. It keeps strings in a memory heap, and frees programmers from concerns about memory allocation and management for strings.

Implementations

The classic implementation was on the PDP-10; it has been used to study compilers, formal grammars, and artificial intelligence, especially machine translation and machine comprehension of natural languages. The PDP-10 was a Mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC from the late 1960s on the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor A compiler is a Computer program (or set of programs that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another In Formal semantics, Computer science and Linguistics, a formal grammar (also called formation rules) is a precise description of a Formal Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation In the Philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is a Language that is spoken or written in phonemic-alphabetic or phonemically-related The original implementation was on an IBM 7090 at Bell Labs, Holmdel, N. J. SNOBOL4 was specifically designed for portability; the first implementation was on an IBM 7094 but it was rapidly ported to many other platforms.

It is normally implemented as an interpreter because of the difficulty in implementing some of its very high-level features, but there is a compiler, the SPITBOL compiler, which provides nearly all the facilities that the interpreter provides. In Computer science, an interpreter normally means a Computer program that executes, i A compiler is a Computer program (or set of programs that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another SPITBOL ( Sp eedy I mplemen' t' ation of SNO' BOL') is a compiled implementation of the SNOBOL4 language.

The Gnat Ada Compiler comes with a package (GNAT. Spitbol) which implements all of the Spitbol string manipulation semantics. This can be called from within an Ada program.

Several implementations are currently available. Macro SNOBOL4 in C written by Phil Budne is a free, open source implementation, capable of running on almost any platform. It is available at http://www.snobol4.org/. Catspaw, Inc. at http://www.snobol4.com/, provides a commercial implementation of the SNOBOL4 language for many different computer platforms, including DOS, Macintosh, Sun, RS/6000, and others. An older version, SNOBOL4+, is now available free from Catspaw. Minnesota SNOBOL4, By Viktors Berstis, is also free.

Although SNOBOL itself has almost a complete absence of structured programming features, a structured version of SNOBOL called Snostorm existed at University College London UCL between 1982 and 1984. SnoStorm is a structured version of the SNOBOL language and in particular SNOBOL4.

See also

• SPITBOL
• Icon programming language
• Unicon programming language

References

Further reading

• Griswold, Ralph E. SPITBOL ( Sp eedy I mplemen' t' ation of SNO' BOL') is a compiled implementation of the SNOBOL4 language. Icon is a very high-level Programming language featuring goal directed execution and many facilities for managing strings and textual patterns Unicon is a Programming language descended from Icon and its preprocessor IDOL that offers better access to the Operating system as well as support for , J. F. Poage, and I. P. Polonsky. The SNOBOL4 Programming Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968 (ISBN 0-13-815373-6).
• Hockey, Susan M. Snobol Programming for the Humanities. New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 (ISBN 0-19-824676-5).

External links

• Catspaw, Inc. offers implementations of and support for SNOBOL4
• Open Directory Project Category for Snobol
• Introduction to Snobol by James Ford
• A sample program in SNOBOL
• Charles Hall Collection on the SNOBOL Programming Language. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.