28 Jul
2022
28 Jul
'22
10:13 a.m.
If memory serves, Ralph Griswold once told me that the four versions of SNOBOL,
culminating with SNOBOL4, took, respectively, a day, a week, a month, and year to
implement.
Related to SNOBOL, something I’ve wondered about for years is whether I may have been the
only regular user of RATSNO, which Dave Hanson created as a test of RATFOR’s
retargetability. I stumbled across RATSNO on the Icon V2 tape, and used it for quite a
bit of my undergraduate programming at NC State in 1980-81.
Phil Budne: Thanks for your CSNOBOL4 implementation! I’ve used it to show students
SNOBOL4 in a comparative languages class at the U of Arizona. (I was thinking your name
sounded familiar!)
On Jul 27, 2022, at 7:03 PM, Phil Budne
<phil(a)ultimate.com> wrote:
Anyway, I have got Phil Budne's
implementation
C'est moi! SNOBOL came out of Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ.
There was a SNOBOL3 implementation in Unix 6th Edition days called "sno".
As far as I know Macro SNOBOL4 (that my CSNOBOL4 is a port of) never
was ported to the PDP-11 (just not enough address space), but there
was a proposal (at least) for a SNOBOL4 implementation for the '11
called ELFBOL.
Macro SPITBOL (a faster implementation of SNOBOL4) was available on
the Research Unix VAXen (Andrew Koenig did a C-like preprocessor
called SNOCONE -- SNOBOL with some sugar).
Phil