[TUHS] SNOBOL and RATSNO

[Rob Pike]

We're probably well off topic now but...

Many years ago I ran into Bob Dewar on a visit to Cambridge University and
we got to talking. He said that the original implementation of SPITBOL, for
the System/360, was in assembler (of course), and written by him and
Belcher (?). The story he told was that they wrote it all down first, put
it on punch cards, and sent it to the IBM machine. The next day they got
back a listing with a bunch of errors. They iterated. By the fourth
round—fifth day—they had a working SPITBOL.

I still marvel at the productivity and precision of his generation of
programmers.

-rob


On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 3:13 PM Jonathan Gevaryahu <jgevaryahu at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> On 7/29/2022 1:07 AM, Tomasz Rola wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 27, 2022 at 10:13:04PM -0600, William H. Mitchell wrote:
> > [...]
> >> 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 at 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".
> > [...]
> >
> > Yes, I have had a look and it seems to be very nicely written
> > project. Oh, and there is plenty of Snobol4 code to look at, too...
> >
> > Thank you.
> >
> Speaking of SNOBOL4, I typed up the SNOBOL code from the NRL Report 7948
> (1975) titled "Automatic Translation of English Text to Phonetics by
> Means of Letter-to-Sound Rules" by Honey Sue Elovitz, Rodney W. Johnson,
> Astrid McHugh and John E. Shore, and made some minor modifications to
> make it work properly with the windows/catspaw version of snobol/spitbol.
>
> It might not be necessary to make those changes at all, with Phil's
> version, I'll need to try that!
>
> I have both the patched and unpatched versions at
> https://github.com/Lord-Nightmare/NRL_TextToPhonemes and it does behave
> correctly/matches the paper (at least the patched version does).
>
> I recently (within the past month) discovered another later port of the
> NRL ruleset from 1978 as part of Peter B. Maggs' ANGLOPHONE package for
> S-100 systems, intended for use with the Computalker CT-1 speech
> synthesis S-100 card. Apparently Rodney W. Johnson had continued
> developing the rules even after the 1975/1976 publications of the NRL
> report and the IEEE ITASSP version of said report, and I haven't updated
> the bibliography on the github readme yet.
>
>
> Jonathan G.
>
> --
> Jonathan Gevaryahu AKA Lord Nightmare
> jgevaryahu at gmail.com
> jgevaryahu at hotmail.com
>
>
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