SNOBOL4.ORG -- SNOBOL4 Resources

Formerly "Phil's SNOBOL4 Resources"
(over 11,000 visitors served)

SNOBOL4 (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language) is a language for text processing, pattern matching, and much more, first designed and implemented at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (BTL) in the 1970's.

The first SNOBOL language was developed by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky in 1962. Farber was once overheard to say that this name was largely contrived when the original JACM article was published. The name was apparently picked when one of the original implementors made a statment such as, "This program doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ...".

The Bell Labs implementation of SNOBOL4 was written in SIL, the SNOBOL Implementation language, meant to be implemented as assembler macros, and is sometimes called Macro SNOBOL4. The original SNOBOL4 was ported to many mainframe computers of the era, including the IBM 360, CDC 6600, GE 635, UNIVAC 1108, RCA Spectra 70, Ferranti Atlas 2, SDS Sigma 7, DEC PDP-10 and Burroughs 6700. Macro SNOBOL4 ports to the 8086 (IBM PC) include Catspaw Vanilla SNOBOL4 and SNOBOL4+, and Minnesota SNOBOL4.

Later implementations of the language include: SPITBOL\360, SPITBOL\370, Macro SPITBOL (including MaxSPITBOL, SPITBOL-386), (all by Robert B.K. Dewar), SITBOL (implemented at Stevens Institute of Technology by James F. Gimpel), FASBOL, ELFBOL and others.

None of them have anything to do COBOL!

Available Implementations

Macro SNOBOL4 in C

Information about my free Macro SNOBOL4 in C, A port of Macro SNOBOL4 (The original Bell Telephone Labs implementation, written in SIL macros) for machines with 32-bit (or larger) pointers. Supports full SNOBOL4 language plus SPITBOL and other extensions.

Catspaw

Mark Emmer's SNOBOL4/SPITBOL Page Includes information on SNOBOL4 mailing list, Snocone preprocessor for, Catspaw SPITBOL Product Spec Sheet/price list PDF file (includes reprints of Gimpel's classic "Orange Book"), SPITBOL Manual PDF file, Free 16-bit SNOBOL4+ for DOS.

SNOBOL related pages

Language references and programming

Humanities

SNOBOL4 has had a following in the humanities, including researchers in linguistics, classics and litterature;

Dead Links?

Formerly working links; (if anyone knows a current location, or has a saved copy of the documents, please let me know!)

SNOBOL-related FTP pointers

Programs from Jim Gimpel's Algorithms in SNOBOL4 (also known as the Orange Book).

Mark Emmer's FTP area (ftp.snobol4.com) Includes SNOBOL4 mailing list archive, Snocone preprocessor, Catspaw SPITBOL product PDF file, Free 16-bit SNOBOL4+ for DOS.

Text and code from the report Artificial Intelligence Programming in SNOBOL4 by Michael G. Shafto;

SNOBOL4 documents from University of Arizona, including S4D58, which describes the SNOBOL Implementation Language (SIL) used in the Macro Implementation of SNOBOL4.

ICON related pages

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This page created and maintained by Phil Budne (phil at ultimate dot com)