[TUHS] SNOBOL and RATSNO

[William H. Mitchell]

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 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".
> 
> 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