String Oriented Symbolic Language
SEXI
SNOBOL
String EXpression Interpreter
(SNOBOL) A string processing language for text
and formula manipulation, developed by David J. Farber, Ralph E.
Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky at Bell Labs in 1962.
SNOBOL had only simple control structures but provided a
rich string-matching formalism of power comparable to regular
expressions but implemented differently. People used it
for simple natural language processing analysis tasks well
into the 1980s. Since then, Perl has come into favour for
such tasks.
SNOBOL was originally called "SEXI" - String EXpression
Interpreter. In spite of the suggestive name, SNOBOL is not
related to COBOL. Farber said the name SNOBOL was largely
contrived at the time the original JACM article was published
when one of the implementors said something like, "This
program doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ...". The
expansion to "String Oriented Symbolic Language" was contrived
later.
Implementations include (in no particular order): SNOBOL2,
SNOBOL3, SNOBOL4, FASBOL, SITBOL, MAINBOL, SPITBOL
and vanilla.
See also EZ, Poplar, SIL and Icon.
<SNOBOL 4>.
<David Farber>.
<Ralph Griswold>.
["SNOBOL, A String Manipulating Language", R. Griswold et al,
J ACM 11(1):21, Jan 1964].
(2004-04-29)
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