What is SNOBOL?
SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language”) is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4.
Foundation of SNOBOL:
Ralph E. Griswold (May 19, 1934, Modesto, CA – October 4, 2006, Tucson, AZ) was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation. His language credits include the string processing language SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon.
He attended Stanford University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in physics, then an M.S. and PhD in electrical engineering. Griswold went to Bell Labs in 1962, where he studied ideas for non-numerical computation. SNOBOL was the outcome; it was a radically different language in its time and still is. He became the head of the Labs’ Programming Research and Development department in 1967.
SNOBOL4 :
SNOBOL4 stands apart from most programming languages of its era by having patterns as a first-class data type (i.e. a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language) and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation. SNOBOL4 patterns are a type of object and admit various manipulations, much like later object-oriented languages such as JavaScript whose patterns are known as regular expressions. In addition, SNOBOL4 strings generated during execution can be treated as programs and either interpreted or compiled and executed (as in the eval function of other languages)
In the 1980s and 1990s, its use faded as newer languages such as AWK and Perl made string manipulation by means of regular expressions fashionable. SNOBOL4 patterns subsume BNF grammars, which are equivalent to context-free grammars and more powerful than regular expressions.
What is SL5?
SL5 Object is a rule-based language for specifying expert systems. … Then it presents a thorough outline of the SL5 Object Language: the syntax of rules and Objects, allowed constructs, the module structure.
Foundation of Icon:
In 1971, he was hired by the University of Arizona to be its first professor of computer science, subsequently organized the department, and was its head until 1981. While in Arizona, Griswold developed Icon. The earlier Ratfor implementation of Icon was discarded and the language rewritten from scratch in C and UNIX.
The icon was designed by Ralph Griswold after leaving Bell Labs where he was a major contributor to the SNOBOL language. SNOBOL was a string-processing language with what would be considered dated syntax by the standards of the early 1970s. After moving to the University of Arizona, he further developed the underlying SNOBOL concepts in SL5 but considered the result to be a failure. This led to the significantly updated Icon, which blends the short but conceptually dense code of SNOBOL-like languages with the more familiar syntax of ALGOL-inspired languages like C or Pascal is not object-oriented, but an object-oriented extension called Idol was developed in 1996 which eventually became Unicon. It also inspired other languages, with its simple generators being especially influential; Icon’s generators were a major inspiration for the Python programming language.
After his retirement, his interests turned to the mathematical aspects of weaving.
Griswold died on October 4, 2006, from cancer.
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