Snobol

from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
String Oriented Symbolic Language
SEXI
SNOBOL
String EXpression Interpreter

   <language> (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 (http://snobol4.org/).

   David Farber (http://cis.upenn.edu/%7Efarber/).

   Ralph Griswold (http://cs.arizona.edu/people/ralph/).

   ["SNOBOL, A String Manipulating Language", R. Griswold et al,
   J ACM 11(1):21, Jan 1964].

   (2004-04-29)