Snobol

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.

External links

• Open Directory Project Category for Snobol (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Snobol/)