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Snobol 4 Programming Language (Automatic Computation)

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In 1974 I was hanging around the University of Toronto's High Speed Job Stream: you could write programs on punch cards and run them on the IBM mainframe without a user account.

I was running FORTRAN programs on the system's WATFIV implementation, when one day I found a big, green textbook left behind by a hapless undergrad. I started perusing the book, and right away I saw that I was no longer in Kansas.

I was looking at the SNOBOL programming language, and the style of programming--using pattern matching, back tracking, succeed, fail, fence, and so forth--was utterly new. My brain exploded and I started writing programs for the University's SPITBOL compiler.

Years later, when I saw Prolog and Regular Expressions, I came to appreciate how innovative the SNOBOL team had been. I've ordered a copy of this text for my library, and I recommend it for anyone who appreciates the work of pioneers like Griswold.

This is the classic Green Book -- the bible of the SNOBOL4 programming language. It can also be used as an authoritative reference for SPITBOL. We used this book in grad school in the late '70s and early '80s, and I still have that copy, with highlights and notes in the margins. It's an outstanding guide to SNOBOL4, written by part of the team at Bell Labs that developed the SNOBOL4 programming language. It's a book for programmers, by programmers.

The book's contents are as follows.

Chapter 1: Introduction to the SNOBOL4 Programming Language
Chapter 2: Pattern Matching
Chapter 3: Primitive Functions, Predicates, and Operations
Chapter 4: Programmer-Defined Functions
Chapter 5: Arrays, Tables, and Defined Data Types
Chapter 6: Keywords, Names, and Code
Chapter 7: Types of Data
Chapter 8: Tracing
Chapter 9: Input and Output
Chapter 10: Running a SNOBOL4 Program
Chapter 11: Programming Details and Storage Management
Appendix A: Syntax of SNOBOL4
Appendix B: Versions 2 and 3 of SNOBOL4
Appendix C: Sample Programs
Appendix D: Solutions to Exercises
References
Index

The book is thorough. This means there's no missing information that you have to look around for elsewhere. The book is also clearly written and amply supported every step of the way with sample code.

If you have no prior experience with SNOBOL 4, it's a general-purpose programming language that is packed with powerful pattern-matching and string-processing capabilities. In my early years in the telecom industry I relied on the power of SNOBOL4 to process, index, and analyze tons of structured and unstructured data from a telco service order entry system, the billing system, and other BSS and OSS. It was the perfect language for the job, and still is.

There are free and low-priced SNOBOL4 and SPITBOL development environments available for many different platforms. Your favorite search engine will turn them up pretty quickly. Get one of them and a copy of this excellent book, which I see is available here on Amazon.com for around $1.50, and you'll be all set.