SNOBOL

From Citizendium
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.
This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Definition [?]
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

SNOBOL is a computer programming language especially meant for string manipulation. It evolved from SNOBOL 1[1] developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1962. SNOBOL is a tool in such areas as natural language translation, linguistics, text analysis and so on.

The basic data element of SNOBOL is a string of characters. The language has operations for joining and separating strings, for testing their contents and for making replacements in them. The most important operation on a string is the search for a pattern. A pattern can be a simple string or a given number of characters, but it can also be an extremely complicated expression consisting, for example, of a number of alternatives followed by another set of alternatives. The pattern may appear as literal or as variable.

Reference

  1. D. J. Farber, R. E. Griswold, and I.P. Polonsky, SNOBOL, a string manipulation language, J. Association for Comp. Machinery, vol. 11, pp. 21-30 (1964)