[COFF] SNOBOL, ICEBOL, SPITBOL, et al.

[William H. Mitchell]

Re ICEBOL, there were lots of playful names for SNOBOL4 implementations.  FASBOL, SITBOL and surely SPITBOL come to mind.

Learning SPITBOL at NCSU in Dr. Tharp’s CSC 255 changed the course of my life, to my mother’s rue--I ended up moving from NC to AZ.

I’ve mentioned on TUHS that I used Dave Hanson’s RATSNO (RATFOR meets SNOBOL4) on several large undergrad projects.  I’ve since wondered if I was maybe only regular user of RATSNO in the universe.  (Please let me know if I’m not alone in the universe!) I have hopes of reviving RATSNO, if not revived already on some world.

Instead of calling it "RATSNO", Dr. Tharp liked to get my goat by calling it "RATSPIT".

If Ralph Griswold were still around I think he might say to not confuse SNOBOL with SNOBOL2, SNOBOL3, or SNOBOL4; they were all significantly different.  I believe all the creatively named implementations, like SPITBOL, were implementations of SNOBOL4.

Speaking of differences in the four versions, I thought I'd read in Griswold’s HOPL paper on the SNOBOL languages (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800025.1198417) that there was no such thing as a syntactically invalid SNOBOL (v1) program, but I’m not finding that now.

Just now I found that ChatGPT 3.5 does speak somewhat correctly of there being a difference between SNOBOL and SNOBOL4.  However, when I asked it,
	"Write me a SNOBOL program, and not a SNOBOL4, program to print the numbers from one through 10.",

I got this:
       LOOP  I = 1 TO 10
             OUTPUT = I
       END

And--see above--I believe that to be a syntactically valid SNOBOL program! :)

William Mitchell
Mitchell Software Engineering
Occasional Adjunct Instructor at U of AZ CS
520-870-6488 (m)
Discord: whm#5716, Twitter: @x77686d, Skype: x77686d
linkedin.com/in/x77686d

> On Apr 9, 2024, at 2:41 PM, Stuff Received <stuff at riddermarkfarm.ca> wrote:
> 
> On 2024-04-07 19:25, Charles H Sauer (he/him) wrote (in part):
>> On 4/7/2024 6:10 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2 Apr 2024, Charles H Sauer (he/him) wrote:
>>> 
>>> [...]
>>> 
>>>> I wrote a Fortran to PL/I crude translator in SNOBOL [...]
>>> 
>>> Gadzooks...  For our "write a simple compiler" assignment I threatened to
>>> use SNOBOL, but my lecturer (Ken Robinson) threatened to fail me :-)
>>> 
>>> -- Dave
>> SNOBOL fascinated me as soon as I learned in first languages survey course (also covered LISP, ALGOL, others) in 1971.
> 
> I recall a job cards lying around the card readers with ICEBOL written on them.  This may have been a local Toronto variant (in the 1970s).
> 
> S.
>