
This 70-Year-Old Programmer Is Preserving an Ancient Coding Language on GitHub - beliu
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78x5ba/this-70-year-old-programmer-is-preserving-an-ancient-coding-language-on-github
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msla
Here's the specific software being talked about:

> SPITBOL is, Shields says, a "quick and dirty" implementation of a 60s
> programming language called SNOBOL4, written by Robert Dewar. It's terse and
> to the point—28,000 lines of code altogether, half of which are comments—and
> is chiefly meant to manipulate text and symbols, and recognize patterns.
> While SNOBOL4 was seen at the time as powerful but slow, SPITBOL was built
> for speed.

Another implementation of SNOBOL4 which I'm familiar with which has also been
maintained and made freely available under a simple permissive license is Phil
Bunde's CSNOBOL4, based on the Macro SNOBOL4 from Bell Labs:

[http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/](http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/)

Release 2.0 is from January 1, 2015.

He maintains a website with lots more information about SNOBOL and relatives:

[http://www.snobol4.org/index.html](http://www.snobol4.org/index.html)

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cafard
Ah, SNOBOL. I learned in a class, apparently because the instructor had
written a book on it. The good news was that the book was out of print, and so
he provided photocopies. The better news was that it prepared me to encounter
awk and Perl.

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newman8r
He's got the right idea. I think if people want to leave a legacy, open source
projects are the way to go. github and wikimedia really facilitate that.

The content could survive longer than the pyramids if human civilization makes
it that long.

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kazinator
SNOBOL's BREAK and SPAN matching operators provide the inspiration for the
names of functions in the <string.h> library of ISO C.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849340)

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jbritton
SNOBOL is a really interesting domain specific language. You might never use
it, but knowing a little bit about it will certainly broaden your thought
processes. I'm glad somebody is trying to keep it alive.

