SNOBOL (StriNg Oriented symBOlic Language) is a
computer programming language that was developed between
1962 and
1967 at the AT&T Bell Laboratories by D. J. Farber, R. E. Griswold and F. P. Polensky. It 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 and more efficient 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 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.
SNOBOL is designed to process strings of characters. It has exotic features for describing patterns used to search strings. It 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.
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