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I love SNOBOL4/SPITBOL. It was a completely bizarre and original language that was quite powerful. In the late 70s, I took two compiler courses with RBK Dewar,
by geophile 11y ago
I love SNOBOL4/SPITBOL. It was a completely bizarre and original language that was quite powerful.
In the late 70s, I took two compiler courses with RBK Dewar, one of the creators of SPITBOL. Those courses were wonderful. He mentioned SPITBOL occasionally, and I remember one story in particular. The implementation was done in assembler, (if I'm remembering correctly), and it took 20 runs to get a working system, (I guess that means a basic suite of tests running successfully). That style of working is completely alien today, and arguably less effective.
Dewar also spent some time talking about his work on the SETL language (for processing sets). Flow analysis for global optimization could be expressed extremely concisely, and was of course applied to SETL itself.
- Zuider 11y agoThe SETL language is still available. There is an enhanced version written in Java called setlX http://randoom.org/Software/SetlX http://randoom.org/Software/SetlX
- tootie 11y agoI took some undergrad courses with Prof Dewar in the 90s and all he talked about was Ada and Assembly (using an assembler he wrote). Never heard of SPITBOL. His class was great.
- geophile 11y agoI sort of understand it, as he was a pretty major figure in the Ada world. But no mention of SPITBOL at all? :(
- geophile 11y agoForgot to mention it in my original comment, but in the grad-level compiler course, we actually wrote a compiler in SPITBOL. I don't remember if the language choice was optional or mandatory, but I did enjoy it.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThat's the language the first Ada compiler was written in. Anyone knowing about the rough history of Ada compiler already has a reason to look at the language that got the job done. ;)