12 Jan
2012
12 Jan
'12
6:10 p.m.
On 12 Jan 2012 at 23:37, Michael Richter wrote:
I'm pretty sure, actually, that SNOBOL4 (the
version of SNOBOL most
people are referring to when they say SNOBOL) was written in SIL.
That may be true, but when I used SNOBOL4, it was on a S/360 machine
and catastrophic error messages always came from the FORTRAN
routines.
Now you've made me go search my my book...
Okay, look at page 171 in the GPP 1968 SNOBOL4 book. Note that it
mentions FORTRAN I/O routines. Or page 163, where it's mentioned
that input is read from FT05F001--the FORTRAN standard data set.
I suspect SNOBOL4 (or at least S/360 SNOBOL4) was more of a mongrel,
with perhaps some of the parser and interpreter written in SIL, but
called from a FORTRAN mainline program.
And there were several versions of SNOBOL4. The one the book
concerns itself with was 2.0.
There was the 1964 SNOBOL and the 1966 SNOBOL3. Was there ever a
SNOBOL2?
It might be fun to revisit SNOBOL after 40-odd years. It was
something of a hog on a S360/40 back then. It'd probably run like
the wind on a low-end consumer PC today.
--Chuck