Snobol

Dating back to the 1960s, Snobol was the de facto standard text processing language in the mainframe era. Its text manipulation and program control mechanisms, based on hierarchical pattern matching and corresponding success/failure, compare well in effectiveness even with modern languages. In fact, Snobol can still be the tool of choice for tackling a number of text- and symbol-processing problems.

Links of Relevance:

Reading:

‘The SNOBOL4 programming language’: the defining book for Snobol4 by the principal author of the language

Vanilla Snobol4 Tutorial and Reference Manual; also as a PDF book

A 20-page introduction to the language (in Bulgarian)

1, 2, 3, 4: popular articles on Snobol programming

5, 6, 7, 8: popular articles discussing mimicking Snobol techniques in Prolog

Implementations:

Csnobol4: an interpreter for Snobol4 with a number of language extensions

Spitbol: ‘an extremely high performance implementation’ of Snobol4 (a compiler)

Minnesota Snobol4: an interpreter for 16-bit MS-DOS

Oregon Snobol5: updated Minnesota SNOBOL4

Vanilla Snobol4: an interpreter for 16-bit MS-DOS (Snobol with some language limitations)

Snobol4+: the unlimited (but also lacking documentation) product of which Vanilla Snobol4 is the limited version

Snocone: a preprocessor enhancing Snobol with a C-like control structure

TkS*LIDE: a TCL/Tk-based IDE for the language

Snobol resources

boykobbatgmaildotcom